


Rumors/Gossip

by KerylRaist



Series: Tao of the Force [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: And some history, Emperor Ren, F/M, Gray Jedi, Maji - Freeform, Mistress Rey, Porn With Philosophy, Tao of the Force, The Order, Things Are Changing, and the nature of love, because when I say porn with philosophy I'm not kidding, kill the past, oh and PICTURES, vast fluffy wodges of domestic Reylo, what's the point of power, with a lot of politics and economics and Force theology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-04-04 08:10:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 66
Words: 397,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14015985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KerylRaist/pseuds/KerylRaist
Summary: The sequel to Tension/Balance. Kylo and Rey have found their gray, and now it's time to do something with it. Building a relationship, a new understanding of the Force, and a new Order. The past is dying, and the future's uncertain, but they're moving together toward it.





	1. Slick

**Author's Note:**

> This is the sequel to Tension/Balance. It starts up minutes after that one leaves off, and it will make vastly more sense if you read that first.

 

10/28/35 ABY: The Supremacy

 

“Chewie’s helping me set it up. I don’t think the Resistance is too keen on it, but…” Rey’s not sure what to tell Kylo about what his mother is doing. Not sure how much he wants to know. Not sure how much is a violation of the Resistance.

“You teaching new… Force users isn’t part of the master plan to take down the First Order?”

“Apparently not.”

Rey’s in the bath, with Kylo, sitting in his lap, talking about today. He did scrub her back for about a minute, but neither of them is in any particular need of scrubbing, and her shoulders are yelling at her for the huge pile of rocks she moved today, so getting them rubbed is winning out over scrubbing.

Kylo’s never rubbed anyone’s shoulders before, but it’s not that hard. Grab, squeeze gently, repeat. Keep doing it in the spots where Rey makes happy noises, do it a lot more gently when she jumps like a fish out of water. Poke tender spots with his thumb, and then hold his thumb there. He’s probably not good at it, but she’s also never had her back rubbed before, so it’s a learning experience for both of them.

Mostly though, he’s just happy to be holding onto her, real, live, here-in-his-arms, her, while they talk.

Usually the end of his day means silent meditation, and the chance to have a real conversation with someone, without having to guard every word, fear that he might be offering up a chink in his armor, or let too much slip, is proving to be significantly more relaxing than he’d expected.

He’s watching his hand on her shoulder, seeing how his palm spans from her neck to her shoulder, and her neck, how easily it fits in just one hand, aware of how small she is next to him, and just sort of drifting along.

She’s paused, and he can feel he’s supposed to say something, but he wasn’t exactly paying attention to the last few lines.

“Uh…”

“Kylo!”

“What?” He’s trying not to sound annoyed, but his voice is sharp… he can feel her wave of annoyance aimed at him for not listening, and his immediate response to any hot emotion directed toward him is to hit back with it, usually multiplied by a factor of ten.

“You weren’t listening to me!” She’s turned around, facing him, glaring, a little. She’s annoyed, not angry.

There’s an instinct to lash out, to hit her with something like, ‘If it’d been interesting, I’d have been paying attention,’ lift her from annoyance to anger, because anger makes him feel alive and real and… But, some little voice, maybe the child who felt his parents argue, a lot, squashes that response, flat. “I was paying attention to your shoulder and neck.”

“It’s just a neck.”

“It’s yours.” He touches the string of the token. “And it’s my turn for that.”

She blinks, and then takes it off, handing it to him, placing it over his head. “Apparently, it a token in a game.”

He nods. “Junjan. I’ve played it.”

“Were you good at it?”

He shrugs his shoulders. He always had more ‘talent’ to bring to the game than anyone else. “Enough. Even as a child I could make the token spin faster, better, longer, than anyone else.”

“Oh.”

He nods again. “So, what did I miss by watching your neck and shoulder?”

She settles herself in his lap again, this time facing him. “Your name… I was thinking about what I’m going to call,” she touches the token on his chest, “this. I’ve got nothing. How did you come up with your name?”

He runs his fingers through his hair, and sighs… “That was a long time ago.”

“When you were a child?”

“No. I was an adult, young one, eighteen, nineteen, something like that. Still with Luke. It’s not silly or embarrassing, just not anything I’ve thought of recently. Kylo. I wasn’t Ben. I never was. And never was going to be. It started to chafe, feel really wrong about the time he was beginning to consider if I was ready for Master. ‘Master Ben.’ Imagine, if you will, six Padawans calling me that. I could only take it for a year. I changed my name before I left him. But I’m still a Skywalker, and a Solo, for better or for worse. So, Kylo. And Ren just sounded good with it. Probably some part of me liked it because it rhymed with Ben.”

“Familiar but different.”

He inclines his head a little. “Remembering where I came from, but changing where I was going. Does that help?”

“Deji?” She winces before he shakes his head, but only by a second.

“Diej?” He shakes his head at that one, too. “It’ll come.”

She nods, wrapping her arms around his neck, holding him close. In his lap, they’re face to face, lips to lips, and she kisses him, smooth and easy.

He smiles into the kiss, hands falling to her hips, keeping her close. She wraps her legs around his hips, rocking against him.

“Eager?”

“Yes!” Since they’ve been sitting around talking, she’s hit a second wind, and feeling a lot less tired, she’s got some interests that’d like to be satisfied.

Just hearing her say that makes his body rise. And with it, a niggling memory of some mostly asleep thoughts from the morning.

His hands close on her hips, holding her still, so he can keep thinking with his brain.

“Are you on a preventative?”

She’s looking at him like he’s speaking gibberish, and a slow, and horrifying though crosses his mind, no school, no family, no close friends… No conversation about this before… He’s got no idea if she even knows that sex makes babies. He almost chokes on it.

Now she’s gone from looking at him like he’s speaking gibberish to utter confusion. She’s more than close enough to feel his mind whirling around _fast_ trying to figure out how to digest this and what to do next, but she doesn’t know the context.

Finally she says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He nods, briefly. “I could feel that…” He rubs his face, afraid that he’s about to make a fool of himself, or worse, her, and then says… wincing at having to do it… “You know… this,” he rocks his hips a bit, getting across what _this_ he means, “can… make babies, right?”

And yes, that gets her looking at him like he’s a blathering moron. She licks her lips and says, dryly, “I’ve heard some rumors to that effect.”

He just looks at her, and sees it snap into place in her mind. “Oh… Preventatives. Scum sacks…” Her mouth opens into an O as she gets what exactly that means. Yes, she knows the basics of where kids come from, and… She’s putting together what she swallowed the night before, with _scum sack_ and… “Oh! I’d… heard of them…” She thinks a bit longer… Some of the traders had them… They didn’t much seem to value them, but for the women at Niima Outpost, they were worth almost their weight in water. She knows the women bought them, but… She overheard more than a fair share of gossip while cleaning her different finds, so she also, sort of, she hopes, knows how they work. She just… didn’t quite know how _men_ worked. “Wait… Why would you ask if _I_ was using one? Aren’t they for _you?_ ”

“That’s a temporary option,” he’s assuming a scum sack is what local vernacular to the _Supremacy_ refers to as a slick. “They’re a one-time thing. And yes, they’d be for me.” He’s sure he’s blushing, but he keeps going. “There are longer term options. They’ll last for years, and make it impossible to make a baby unless you want to.”

“And you don’t want to?”

His eyes are very dark, searching hers, and his voice serious as he says, “Not now. If it happened…” he can only feel his life and hers, but he also knows that they won’t know for sure for a while.

She catches the faint hint of disappointment as he only feels two lives. The sense of something desired, deeply, intensely, passionately, even though it’s not right or good, now. She feels the part of him that wants to burn all of this and just cuddle into her and a family and the part that wants _more._ The part that knows there isn’t a version of this where the two of the just run off and shed the wider galaxy. The part that knows that if he’s going to get that family, he’s got to secure a time and space for them, and the only way to do that is to get through _now_. She gently strokes his face, and lets him feel a similar confused disappointment. Then she nods. “If it happened… Otherwise, no, not now.”

He kisses her shoulder. “I have some slicks… scum sacks… that’s a terrible name.” He’s seeing a whole new light on the idea of calling someone _rebel scum_ , and is wondering if _that’s_ what Hux meant by it.

She shrugs. That’s just what they are, in her world. “Why slicks?”

“You can see in bit?” He’d rather show than explain that they’re lubricated, hence, slick. He’s also realizing that for anything longer term, he’s either got to get to a medical droid, or she does. And he’s thinking it’s unlikely she’s going to find a first class medical droid in the middle of whatever planet she’s on right now. And it’s even more unlikely that he’s going to take her through the _Supremacy_ to the infirmary.

Which means he’s got a trip to the infirmary, soon. “For right now, the slicks will do, and in the next few days, I can get something better, longer lasting, and… um…” He’s absolutely blushing now. “Uh… more comfortable…”

“They hurt?” She’s rethinking what she knows about how they work.

“No! They’re just… not as good as without one.”

“Oh.”

“You’ve got to stop and put them on, and they don’t taste or smell very good, and you can’t feel as much through them.”

She traces his lips… “Why use them then?”

The not-having-babies-when-you-don’t-want-them-thing seemed self-evident to him, so he’s not sure what she’s asking.

Then she leans closer and nibbles his bottom lip, laying a long, wet lick along it. As she’s kissing him, she takes his hand in hers, and gives his fingers a gentle squeeze.

And suddenly he gets what she’s asking.

She pulls back, looking at him, a glint in her dark brown eyes. She stands up, water streaming off of her, and looks over to his bed. “I kiss you, you kiss me, and your slicks can… stay wherever it is you keep them?”

And that sounds like the best damn idea he’s ever heard.

He stands up, fast, and scoops her up, hoisting her over his shoulder, and she shrieks at it, half-surprised, half-delighted, and he _almost_ slips in the pool, because she jerks a little when he does it, but between his own balance and Force control, he keeps standing.

From her position over his shoulder, she’s got a great view of the whole of his back, which she hasn’t seen all the much of. She’s never given much thought to the backsides of men in general or Kylo in specific, but watching him walk, naked, dripping wet, gleaming in the soft blue-gray light of his rooms, stepping out of the pool and then across his room, is hypnotic. His ghost pale skin, and the light gray shadows of each muscle flexing with each step is something she could watch for days.

Her eyes are drawn to his bottom, and the little sway with each step. And for the first time ever, she’s thinking how much she’d like to get him to lie down and let her just stroke, pet, and kiss every inch of him.

Twice.

At least.

He plops her in the center of the bed, not very romantic, but fairly efficient, and stands at the edge of the bed, looking. He likes looking. At all of her. He feels like he could stay here for weeks, staring at her skin, the shape of her body, all of her curves and straights.

She wriggles a little, a tinge uncomfortable at him just _looking_ but he lets her feel how much he enjoys it, and that tinge fades.

“You’re so beautiful…” he gets the sense no one’s ever said that to her, at least, said it and didn’t have a threat behind it.

 

 

He lifts her ankle to his lips, laying a gentle kiss against it. She leans back, weight on her elbows, watching him nibbling along her leg. Her eyes dance over his skin, from the width of his shoulders, to his narrow hips, the ripple of his stomach as he breathes, and his shaft rising between his legs, to his huge hands against her calf, the flex of the muscles of his arm and back as he shifts weight, shifts his hold, and kisses her calf.

“You are, too.”

He smirks a little, deflecting that. “No, I’m not.”

“I get to decide what I consider beautiful. Not you.”

He nips her leg.

“None of that. I like looking at you,” Rey says, eyes dragging from his knees to his eyes.

He tries smiling this time, and again lays his lips to her leg, just at her knee.

They hold eye contact, as he lightly licks along the inside of her knee. Rey feels her breath speed and her heart pick up to go with it. She rubs her lips together, and says, “So beautiful. Beautiful Kylo.”

His eyes slide shut at that, and he hisses he inhales so fast at it, but she knows that’s the sort of hiss that goes with pleasure, not pain.

“You like hearing that.”

He kisses a little higher up this time, midway up her thigh. “Don’t you, beautiful Rey?”

She smiles a little, she does like hearing it, but it’s not the same visceral reaction he had to it.

He’s kneeling on the floor, between her legs, realizing he likes talking to her. Just having another voice, and the moans make him happy, but… He wants words, too.  “What do you call this,” he says, smiling at her, palm resting on her delta, cupping the whole thing.

 

 

She blinks, not expecting that. “Uh…”

“Local slang. Something nicer than scum sack, hopefully?”

He wriggles his fingers, gently combing them through her hair. “Delta, that’s more or less the whole thing. Muff…” he gives her hair just a gentle tug… “That one was popular when I was young.”

“Uh… Maomao…”

“What’s a maomao?”

“They’re…” she’s blushing… “little desert creatures. Some people keep them as pets. They eat the littler creatures that get into the food. They’ve got a long tail and pointy ears, and are soft and furry, and if you pet them right, they purr.”

He grins, liking that, a lot. He kisses her delta, and says, “Maomao,” between kisses. “If I pet it right, will you purr?”

She smiles at him. “Try it and see.”

He does, palm of his hand gently pressing against her while his fingers ripple.

She does offer up a little purr. He lowers himself, nuzzling along the line where leg becomes pelvis, stroking his hand over her delta. That gets a louder purr.

He purrs back, enjoying having her laid out before him, making happy noises at something he’s doing.

“What’s a muff?”

“Uh…” that stops him dead in his tracks. He looks up at her. “It’s…” He’s thinking hard, it’s got to be something else, right? “I don’t actually know. Maybe it always meant this.”

She sits up, pulls him to join her on the bed, and flips around, so they’re facing each other, but tops to tails. She props herself on one elbow, and strokes his shaft. “Shaft, joystick, wankwand, buggerstick, pocket rocket, old one eye…”

“You’ve got a lot of names for this.”

“The traders tended to call each other versions of it, a lot.”

“Soldiers do that, too.” He drags his own fingers up himself. “Shaft, usually. Tool sometimes. ‘Get your tool serviced…’ ‘I’ve got the tool you need…’”

She sniggers a little at that. “Have you ever actually said that to someone?”

“Not before five seconds ago.”

“Good.”

Her fingers ghost after his and he shivers slightly at it. Then she circles the tip. “This bit?” She’s looking intensely at it. “It changes. I mean… it all changes, but… when you’re soft, it covers the whole top, and right now it’s only got most of it, and last night it was… gone… but it can’t do that, right?”

He grins. “Cap or cowl.” He takes her hand in his, and gets a firm hold and slides her fist down him, and it pulls back with the friction. “It moves. Now, and when I’m getting hard, you can slide it up and down. When I’m really enjoying it, close to spurting, it tends to stay down.”

“Does it feel good? The sliding?” she’s gently rubbing her hand up and down, watching it creep over the head of his shaft.

“Yes.” He doesn’t exactly whisper, but there’s a breathy quality to his words. “The tip… head… is really sensitive, so sometimes it’s nice to feel it through the cap.”

Her finger slips over the naked tip. “Is this okay?”

His eyes are closed, and he’s breathing a little heavier. “It really is. Just… like last night, slow, gentle, wet, get to know it, and we’ll get to harder and more force.”

She giggles a little at that. He takes her hand, dragging it down, further, so it’s cupping him. “Stones, balls…” He’s looking at her, waiting for her to add her own words, and she shakes her head.

“I can’t.”

He can feel that even the idea of this word scandalizes her. “Why not?”

“It’s a _really_ bad word. You only say it when… when things are…” She shakes her head again. “You don’t _ever_ call anyone that. They’ll cut you for it.”

Kylo’s certainly run into some serious cursing over the years, but he can’t think of any _one_ word that would get that sort of result. “Really?”

She nods.

“Well… what would you call them if you… didn’t want to start a fight?”

It’s clear that’s not an idea she’s ever run into before. “Why would you need to?”

He’ll admit it’s not exactly something that comes up in daily conversation, especially if you don’t happen to personally have a set of them, but… He’s holding her hand and shows her how to give them a very gentle little tug. “Because touching them feels good.”

“Oh.” She gives him another gentle little tug. “Kissing them, too?”

His mouth opens as just the idea of that stutters through him electrically. “I… don’t know… but I bet it would.”

She shifts down a bit, and lays a gentle, closed mouth kiss against the right one. It feels nice. The little lick that goes with it feels better. When she opens her mouth and lightly sucks it, he just about levitates off the bed.

She grins at him as she pulls back. “I’d say that felt good.”

“Good doesn’t begin to…” he lifts her leg and scoots closer. Her body’s spread out before him, wet and pink and open and fragrant and… Gods, it’s everything he wants. And right now he wants to feel good touching her and feel good with her touching him. He trails his finger over her lips, keeping the touch light, reveling at how slick she is against his skin.

“Lips.”

She makes a little mmmm… sound. Apparently not much caring one way or another what he calls any of this.

He strokes up to where they come together, and then gently presses, the pad of his finger just above her jewel, and rubs over it. “Jewel or pearl. Pink pearl, sometimes.”

She moans at that. “I don’t care what you call it, just keep…” her voice stutters as he rubs again. Then he stops, waiting for her.

“I don’t have a word for it. The whole thing is a maomao! That’s just it.”

“The whole thing is beautiful, it, you, and I want to…” he bows his head, laying wet, open mouthed kisses all over her.

She groans, enjoying it, enjoying the feel of him doing it as a matter of physical sensation, and the feel of him doing it in his head. How much he’s enjoying the taste and the feel of her wet against him.

And she knows what would make it better.

Shallow, easy, just get to know it. She paid attention last night and starts with licks, getting everything wet, tip to stones, and hears him hiss again, and feels the jolt of pleasure through him.

He licks back, faster, tongue sliding against her, and she shudders as he gets her _right_ _there._

She closes her mouth around him, sucking gently on the tip, hand cupping his stones, and he groans, loud.

Her hips jolt as one of his fingers slowly eases into her, adding a welcome stretch to go with the wet glide of his tongue.

It’s almost too much sensation all at once. She’s a mouth sucking, and that’s one set of feelings. Smooth, so smooth, hard shaft, sueded-velvet on her lips and tongue… The feel of kissing, good kissing, wet and slick against her lips. She’s a maomao being licked, wet and slick and electric, the glide of his tongue and the fullness from his fingers and the grind of her hips looking for more. Balancing between those two points is difficult enough. But she’s not just feeling it through her body, her senses, she can feel it through his skin, his mind, too.

She can feel him slip between her lips, the gentle press, wet and tight lips around him, and then breach, hot and shuddering wet all over. The drive to thrust, to bury her--himself between her lips, seeking hot and wet and sucking. The feel of her body around his fingers, hot and cling, the taste of herself on his lips and tongue, and wet and slick against his lips, and more motion, wet, gliding, friction, slippery seeking more touch more motion more _more…_

His tongue is right right right right there and there and…

And where she ends and he begins is slipping away, melting into two points of pleasure, blending outward…

And like last time, she’s growing tight and unraveling. Muscles tighter, faster, less coordinated as her mind and senses spin outward, loose and eager.

She doesn’t know where the wave starts, her, him? Doesn’t matter. It starts, a long, slow swell building like a sand dune, and crashing down, fast, hard, jolting through both of them, again and again and again.

He’s laying with his head on her thigh, body still twitching slightly, blissed out and extremely pleased that she had this idea. His voice is soft and low as he says, “We should do this, a lot, too.”

She gently kisses the tip of his shaft, licking the last little drop of spurt off, and says, “Sounds good to me.” And then yawns. “Later.”

“Later is good.”

* * *

 

 

 

Later, he wakes up, and she’s on top of him, rubbing, wet and slick against him, and all he wants to do is cant his hips just a little, go from her rubbing on him to him rubbing in her.

He groans at the feel of it. “More?”

 

 

“Yes.” More a heavy exhalation than a word.

He swallows hard, and rolls over, opening the first of the drawers under his bed. He feels cold with her body not right on top of his, and he’s missing the sweet pressure of her body on his, but he's fairly sure that once is safe enough, but twice is just spitting in fate’s face and daring it to slap you.

He doesn’t keep much in the drawers under his bed. Mostly protein bars. Some vitamin mush. Extra data pads. And a few slicks. He grabs one, and rolls back onto his back, cracks the pack, pulls it out, tosses the pack aside, and rolls it down. He hasn’t done this often, only once in the last year, but enough he’s got the moves down.

Rey’s pulling at him, trying to get him on top of her, but he’s sleepy and dreamy and really liked what she was doing before. “You on me,” he says.

He sees her get what he’s saying, that what she was doing before works… he shudders, the feel of her on him slithering through him as she slides onto him… almost exactly the same.

Almost… She keeps pulling off every few strokes to glide her pearl on his shaft, and that’s good for her, but not as good for him.

It takes him a moment to figure out a solution, so that the part of her that most wants to be touched, and the part of him that most wants to be enveloped, both get what they want.

He worms a hand between them, pressing it to his pelvis and low belly, and then she can glide and grind on his fingers and he can keep his shaft in her and very soon they’re both having an _excellent_ time.

After, when he’s got to extricate himself from the slick, he remembers a lot of what he doesn’t like about them. She’s blissfully asleep again before he’s gotten the damn thing all the way off, tied, and thrown… hopefully, into his wastebasket.

* * *

 

  

The rumors begin, as they often do, with the cleaning staff.

Kylo was not, on any level, expecting there to be any gossip. Droids, if programmed for secrecy, cannot tell what they know, so his secrets, like his tendency to vanish from the _Supremacy_ , or his nocturnal guest were safe with C8.

Likewise, the medical droid who will set him up with a long-acting preventative later that afternoon, could not, even if it wanted to, (though it also couldn’t want to) tell anyone about the two small injections to render him sterile for the next three years.

What Kylo did not take into account is that all of his servants are not droids.

And that, even very discrete human interactions leave certain… telltale signs.

Every day, when Kylo is in his throne room, dealing with whomever or whatever needs to be dealt with, a very trusted, highly-cleared member of the janitorial team empties his trash.

Every day, he removes three protein bar wrappers, two tubes of vitamin mush, and nothing else from a sleek black wastebasket that sits next to Kylo’s bed.

Today, he removes three protein bar wrappers, two empty tubes of vitamin mush, two used slicks, and two slicks packs. He mentally chuckles. After all, it wouldn’t do to make noise. He also says to himself, _No wonder the bastard’s been in such a good mood recently._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey All,
> 
> Since I first wrote these chapters, Tumblr, which I had used for my image hosting, had something of a Puritan hissy-fit, and decided to get out of the adult-oriented image business. 
> 
> So, if you notice missing images/broken links, please drop me a note. I'm in the process of uploading everything to my wordpress blog, (kerylraist.wordpress.com, it was supposed to be behind the scenes stuff for the Tao-Verse works, and art musings, and, well, now it's the Tao-Verse, too.) and getting all the bits and bobs in order over there, and by extension, over here.
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> Keryl
> 
> Update 2/23/19 
> 
> Do you hear that sound? The sound of Keryl screaming into a pillow? Yeah. That sound. Apparently, Wordpress either had buried in it's terms and conditions back in the day (though I doubt it, I've had a wordpress with smut in it for three years now), or at least now, that it won't host "porn." What's porn? Pictures of people fucking.
> 
> So yeah, dead to rights, I'm violating their terms and conditions. I'm thinking said condition may be new, because I know when I set up my first wordpress I checked for stuff like that, and as of two months ago, a lot of tumblr users were porting their NSFW blogs over there, but... Anyway. Nothing to be done for it. I cannot appeal this because I'm REALLY violating their terms.
> 
> They suspended my account, so I'm, once again, re-uploading my content. Over to pillowfort I go. (pillowfort.io/kerylraist) where, since it's supported by it's subscribers, and doesn't bloody care if the Apple Store goes into an anti-smut hissy fit, I will, with any luck, be able to keep my stuff. 
> 
> Wish me luck, and think kindly of me as I sit my ass down to re-do this AGAIN.
> 
> And, again, if you find a hole in the story where you think a picture should go, drop me a line, because it probably means I missed one.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Keryl


	2. Thread

 

11/1/35 ABY: The Supremacy

 

Kylo holds two mockups of his new badge. One, for non-citizens, looks pretty much exactly the way it did before. The rays extend all the way to the center, though if he had to guess he’d say they’re emanating out of the center instead of leading into it, but all in all he’s pleased. It doesn’t put him in mind of a giant mouth about to eat anything in it’s path any longer.

 

 

The second one has a wide silver band around the white of the circle. The mark of a citizen. He nods at that, still pleased. It’s quite visible, but doesn’t take away from the complete design.

His Designer, (Captain Frakes, C8 tells him) looks at him, a little nervous, but proud. He’s satisfied with the job, and he thinks Kylo will be, too.

Kylo nods. “The helmet?”

“I have sketches. If they look right, we’ll get the prototype up.” He passes over the sketches. Frakes must have incredible visual memory. Kylo wore the mask, he _built_ it, and he’s not sure he could sketch it that well from memory.

“This is good.”

“Thank you, My Lord.”

“Put the badges into production. How long to have enough of them ready to switch everyone over?”

Frakes thinks about it, and then pulls out a datapad, doing some calculations. “Probably a month. Depends on how many we need with the silver piping, and if I can get enough of the silver thread. If I can’t, two months.”

“And another two weeks for the helmet.”

“Ten days.”

“Even better.”

Frakes is fiddling with something in his pocket, and Kylo can feel that he’s not sure if he should bring it up.

“What?”

He looks away, and if it weren’t for the fact that Kylo’s danger sense isn’t triggering, he’d assume an attack was coming, but… whatever it is, it’s not dangerous.

“You… didn’t ask for it… and…” He’s looking at Kylo’s everyday command blacks. “I know you don’t wear the First Order uniform, but…” He pulls another badge out. It’s the citizen’s badge, but the hexagon is in silver as well as the circle. “I thought… maybe… a mark of office for you, too, My Lord.”

Kylo looks at it, and nods, seeing how this fits in. He was never part of the First Order, intentionally. He was Snoke’s personal enforcer, on his own, _special_ missions. He was given command privilege, and the leeway to use those privileges to do whatever he needed to accomplish his tasks, but no rank. The only ranks that have ever mattered to him, Master of the Knights of Ren, and Supreme Leader are the ones he bestowed upon himself. The ones he’s earned with his blade.

But if he is to lead something, it would make sense for him to be a member of it, wouldn’t it?

“I like it.”

Frakes leans forward, and lightly touches Kylo’s left sleeve. “We all wear our badges here, I can start adding them to your tunics, if you like.”

Kylo chuckles a little at that. “You could, but the tunic doesn’t have sleeves. It’s the shirt under it that has the sleeve.”

Frakes looks down, blushing, and stammers, “I’m sorry, My Lord…”

“It’s nothing to worry about. Yes, a set of shirts with the badge on them would be good.”

“Yes, sir. Do you want command stripes?”

“No. I don’t need them.” 

Frakes eyes him, looking at not just the man in front of him, but the _image_ of him as well, and nods, slowly, seeing an image of _The Supreme Leader_. “No. You don’t.”

Frakes looks like he’s expecting to be dismissed, but Kylo’s got another thought in mind. If he’s going to have a coronation… He might as well _have a coronation._  “Did you see General Hux’s last speech?”

“Not in person.”

Kylo doesn’t say, “I daresay not, otherwise you’d be a cinder,” he does say, “I’m thinking of a similar rally, and I’m going to need new accoutrements branded with my symbol.”

“Flags, banners… things like that?”

“Yes. Can you set something like that up?”

“Yes, my Lord!” His eyes are gleaming. Kylo doesn’t know what his grand vision looks like, and then, as he gently brushes against his mind, he does. It’s here, inside the Supremacy, all in gleaming black walls and cool white pillars. Long, flowing banners of black with the same symbol that Kylo’s holding in his hand now, his personal symbol and colors, draped from ceiling to floor. Every person who can be spared from his duty is standing, in perfect formation, rank after rank of white armor and dark uniforms, all of them staring up at a podium, also draped in Kylo’s symbol, waiting for whatever their Supreme Leader is about to say to them.

Kylo nods. “That will be beyond acceptable, Major Frakes.”

Frakes eyes go wide. He swallows a huge smile. “Major?”

Kylo nods again. “Major. I have a feeling that I will need someone with an eye for the look of things, likely quite often, in the next few years, and so far, you are proving to be…” Snoke would have said, ‘barely adequate’ or something like that, “more than I expected. Eventually, we’ll put the new symbol on all of our gear. I have the feeling we’re going to need a lot of stencils.”

“Yes, sir! I will see to it.”

“Thank you, Major Frakes.”

 

 

* * *

“You enjoyed that,” Rey says, appearing from behind him, and then stepping over to lean against the desk he’s sitting at. She looks around. He’s in his private office right now, and it’s a space she’s never set foot in. Like his private chambers, it’s black. Black walls, black floor, black desk, black. It’s a room that feels like it eats light, never letting a ray of it escape.

The one wall that’s entirely window is nice, though. She can see several of his other ships keeping pace with the _Supremacy_ , uncounted stars, and three large planets, one with a wide ring around it.

“You weren’t here, were you?” he asks.

“No. I could feel you weren’t alone, so I didn’t come through. I could feel you enjoying it, though.”

“I did.” He holds up the badge. “Kill the past, step… Whatever this is.”

She takes it from him, looking at it. She personally prefers more swoopy, organic shapes, but this is certainly better than the old version.

“Will you rename it?”

He nods. “Yes. I want to set myself apart from Snoke. I want a clear line between me and him.”

“But you still want people to know where you came from?” She puts the badge on his desk. “After all, the shape is similar.”

“Perfected?” Though looking at it, he can feel it’s not right, not yet. Getting there, but… Not yet.

He pushes his chair back from his desk, and pats his lap. She comes over to sit with him. He kisses her hello, and she kisses back. Her look lets him know she’s still interested in where he was going with that idea. He touches the badge. “Even I wasn’t angry enough to sign up for a group just to burn the galaxy down. And I wasn’t angry enough at my parents to join the First Order just because they stood against it. The First Order was supposed to be about _Order._ There was supposed to be a great structure, a rise of law, and power wielded intelligently. None of the eternal civil wars, backstabbing, and scrabbling of the New Republic. When Palpatine fell, every member of the Empire who had a rank above Major grabbed everything he could and set up his own little kingdom, and then fought with everyone around him to hold and expand it. Most of the ‘newly liberated’ planets spun into… anarchy. Some of them… Once the Empire was gone, they had no jobs, no infrastructure, no… anything. They needed a leader, and anyone with a big enough gun who showed up got to be it.

“Some had strong laws and traditions, they slipped out of the Empire right into a Republic and barely even blinked. And as soon as they were part of the New Republic they started jockeying for power and attacking each other.”

He shakes his head at that. “Snoke had the biggest gun. And he had it in system after system. And with every system he added, his gun got bigger. Then he turned it on the Senate, and they tried to play each other against him and all the rest of them.” He’s got a look in his eyes she’s never seen before, wry and jaded. “After all, she was General Organa of the _Resistance_ not the New Republic. She couldn’t get enough backing in the government she built herself to be a legitimate commander defending the democracy she herself set into motion.”

“But he couldn’t get enough of them to support him, either.”

Kylo shrugs. “Hux wanted them dead. Snoke wanted… Luke dead. He wanted to be the greatest Force wielder in a galaxy on their knees begging him for… I don’t know. Hux wanted them calling his name, worshiping him, and anyone who didn’t toe their line had to go.”

“So the Hosnian system…”

“Hux thought that was a good way to completely destroy what was left of the Republic and the Resistance. He wasn’t wrong. He destroyed Hosnian, all of my mother’s men went after him, he got the whole Resistance out in one place, tagged their ships, and by the time the fight was done everyone on your side still alive fit in the Falcon.”

“I take it he didn’t anticipate losing Starkiller and Snoke in the process?” her voice is dry. Talking about Hux makes her feel squirmy on several levels.

Kylo smiles dryly back at her, keeping to her tone. “He certainly appeared to be surprised by that turn of events.” He touches the badge again. “One unified system. Moving together toward a better galaxy. One at peace and functional. Snoke had the ideal, but not the follow through.”

“And you have the follow through.”

He crooks an eyebrow, looking out at the ships and planets. Then he touches the badge again, finger dragging over the silver hexagon. _His_ silver hexagon. “I guess we’ll see.”

 

* * *

Sometimes rumors are true. When the orders for new badges begin to filter through the manufacturing section of the Supremacy, and when those badges being to show up in the laundry division, rumors spread like fire through the oxygen producers.

Long before the first sewing machine passes a needle through one of the new badges, there’s talk of a change coming.

 


	3. Stains

11/4/35 ABY Lirium

 

“Balance.”

Rey stares at the transteel pieces hovering above her.

Chewie brought them yesterday. Supposedly, if you put them together correctly, they form a dome twenty-five meters across, fifteen meters high, clearer than glass, stronger than steel, and lighter than either by a factor of a thousand.

Supposedly, if she’s got them placed properly, and balanced correctly, when she lowers them the last few centimeters, all twelve of them will lock into place, and her chapel to balance will have a dome.

If…

She’s been holding them up there for a good minute, minutely adjusting the plates. If any one of them is so much a five millimeters off, all twelve of them crash to the ground, instead of locking to place with one another, forming a watertight seal.

So, far, she’s successfully spilled them all to the ground five times. Her floor, that she’s spent so long placing swirls of light gray and dark gray rocks on, has been violently rearranged by transteel plates to the point where she feels like she's going to have to start from scratch on it.

So, each additional crash makes balancing, keeping calm and centered and focused that much harder.

She gently eases them down just a hair more, and then readjusts again, and another hair down, from here, on the inside, she can see the plates just barely, almost, not quite touching the carefully leveled plastcrete base she spent all of yesterday and the day before setting into place to support the dome.

No matter how wet or muddy or frozen or whatever the weather might bring here, the ground under the plates won’t be able to shift enough to take the roof down.

Rey walks around under the dome, looking at everything, studying it, checking again and again.

“I hit a three meter target going 90 kpm blind by _feeling_ it. Just relax and feel it, Rey,” Luke says, staring up at the pieces of her dome.

She rolls her eyes. “I did that. It collapsed. It’s _felt_ right several times. That didn’t keep it standing. Now, I’m checking.”

Luke doesn’t look even remotely shocked when she releases her hold on the Force, lets the dome settle, and it collapses again.

“Feel each piece, Rey. It’ll tell you where it goes.”

“They’re numbered.”

“Of course. You’ve got directions, and a manual, and numbered pieces. Obviously, that’ll work.” He pointedly looks around at the fallen pieces of dome.

“You know, no one says how sarcastic you were when they talk about you.”

“Because I didn’t used to be sarcastic. Watching every dream you ever had come true while being lauded as a hero and a bringer of a new golden age doesn’t make a person sarcastic. Seeing them all die, betraying yourself and everyone who ever mattered to you, does. Back to building. Feel them. They’ve been in transit for a long time, their balance has shifted.”

She grits her teeth, and tries to feel what’s around her. Lumps of empty metal.

“I don’t suppose you’d use your great Jedi Mastery to do this for me?”

“Nope.” He smirks at that. “Though I’ll give you a pointer, use your hands and actually _feel_ it this time.”

“This from the man who whacked my hand when I ‘felt’ with it the first time.”

“You weren’t building a dome that time.”

She picks up the first piece. It’s not heavy. It is huge and unwieldy. It feels like… thirteen meters of transteel trying to catch the wind and sail away from her.

She sees Luke smirking, and gets a flash of what he’s thinking. “Oh.”

He smiles. “Jedi and domes. I don’t know what the attraction is, but I collapsed eight of them before I got the first one up at my own temple.”

She laughs at that.

“And if Chewie got this from the same place he got mine… Those instruction manuals are basically just suggestions.”

She picks up the next one, pulling it away from the center of her floor. The weigh is different, and the feel a little off.

He sees her feel it and nods. “I think the guy who makes them was a friend of Lando. Probably a better gambling buddy than engineer.”

She continues picking them up, and begins to move them around her chapel. The order they were numbered in certainly was a suggestion, and not a good one. By feeling, literally feeling them, she can feel what the problems are, among other things they aren’t all exactly the same shape.

“It’s funny, if this had been a ship part, or a… mechanical problem… the first thing I would have done was pick them up. I’d have felt this.” And she would have. She’s always been good at laying hands on a problem and just fixing it by how it felt.

Luke nods. “But you saw a problem you wanted to solve with the Force, so you used it.” He saunters over to her, and lays his hands on hers. “It’s all feeling, and it’s all the Force.”

“That’s what you mean by floating rocks is a trick?”

“Part of it. Most of the skills the Force has given you, or sharpened for you, you use every day without even noticing it. Don’t rewire what works so you can ‘magic’ something.”

Rey nods.

 

* * *

On her seventh try, the dome of the first chapel of the… whatever they are… goes up, and stays up.    

 

* * *

She’s excited about it, pleased to see it finally up, and sends a _Come, see!_ to Kylo, before going back to setting the floor back into place.

She gets a sense back from him. He’s busy, but will come by, with food, as soon as he can.

 _Food…_ Her stomach growls at her, and she sends back. _Soon._

_Soon._

* * *

Protein bars are fast. Food, real food, produced by his cooking staff, is not. He’s started asking for real food, for both of them, breakfast and supper. One plate, with a _large_ portion of whatever the chef is making for himself. He has C8 scan it, make sure there’s nothing in there that isn’t food, and then he and Rey eat it.

The first few times they did this, C8 pointed out higher than optimal levels of fat, sugar, and salt, but… Turns out that’s apparently part of what makes a lot of food taste good, so he’s not exactly regretting that.

Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it isn’t. But it’s different, and new, and… He likes the… pleasure of it. There’s something really nice about sitting down with her, and real food, and exploring it, together.

But real food takes _time._

Kylo’s been dealing with minutia all day, and just wants to get away from it. He grabs a few protein bars, and shifts over to Rey. He’s barely a meter away from her, looking up at what she’s built. For a second, he’s appreciating the dome, seeing what she’s excited about and then a smell hits him, and his adrenaline spikes, _hard,_ and he’s springing towards her, looking, frantically, for what’s wrong, for how she’s _hurt_ , before either of them know what’s happening.

 

* * *

“Kylo!” Not that Rey’s particularly bothered by getting jumped by Kylo, but his isn’t erotic or affectionate, he’s… touching everything, pushing her clothing up, a string of fast, worried words spilling out of him. She finally grabs hold of him and stops him. “What?”

“What! You’re bleeding!” His eyes are wild, and he’s still patting her down, looking for the wound. “Are you in pain? What’s…”

Her eyes close, and she mentally growls.

He jerks back, worried he just made everything worse, and she pats him, “I’m not growling at you.  Just… Yes… I’m fine… I thought the back pain” She grabs his hand, because he’s about to start putting pressure on her back to stop whatever bleeding must be going on. “was because I was bending over, fixing my rocks.” She glares at the lake, too. Sometimes there’s something to be said for a functional bathroom.

Which she doesn’t yet have.

“You mind if we go back to the _Supremacy_?”

“If it gets you to an infirmary, I’ll bring the _Supremacy_ to us.”

“I’m _fine._ I don’t need a doctor.”

“You’re bleeding. I can smell it.”

She’s suddenly understanding that moment in the bath when he was having a fast and somewhat astounded mental debate about preventatives, because she’s having one of her own right now about menstrual cycles. However, since she’s shifted positions, and is no longer lying on her side, lining up little rocks, gravity is adding its own effect to the situation, so she’s got to figure out how to have this conversation a lot faster than he did, or else she’s going to have some serious laundry issues, too.   

“Give me five minutes, I’ll explain everything. I’m not hurt, not dying, nothing is wrong. Just… let me get to your bathroom.”  She darts to her tent, and then flashes back to his rooms on the _Supremacy_.

 

 

* * *

She says she’s fine. She’s acting fine. At least, she’s not nervous or worried or scared or anything like that, so… That’s helping. That’s the only reason why Kylo has not burst into his bathroom to find out what’s going on. He is, however, pacing, fast and agitated around his room.

Okay, not the _only_ reason, but the main one.

And honestly, if it’s for her, he can stuff the fact he doesn’t much like blood.

Another two minutes later, he hears water rushing, and a minute after that she’s out and sits next to him, looking calm, and he can’t smell anything besides her now, so…

 

 

* * *

He’s staring down at her, with a very obvious, _That was terrifying, so how about you put me out of my misery and explain it, please,_ sort of look.

Rey’s still not exactly sure how to do that. Her mouth opens a few times, and closes and… Finally… “You remember us talking about preventatives, right?”

He nods.

“Well, this is how I know we didn’t make a baby.”

He blinks at that. “Oh…” Then he winces a little, feeling stupid. “Blood… It’s blood…”

Now she’s staring at him… “Kylo?”

“Apparently sexual education with Luke left something to be desired. ‘And if the egg isn’t fertilized, at the end of the cycle the lining of the uterus sheds.’”

Rey supposes that’s true, but… “That’s not very descriptive.”

“Apparently, he didn’t think we’d need a more in depth one.” Though he’s supposes it might be possible that that’s all Luke knew on the subject, too.

“Didn’t you have some very surprised girls at his school?”

“Maybe they got a better lesson?” Kylo shrugs. “He’d talk to the boys when we got to twelve. I was the only boy my age, so I got a one on one conversation, and after an embarrassed half hour, where I asked exactly no questions because it was clear he wasn’t comfortable talking about it and didn’t have any practical experience to answer my questions with, we were done.”

“So… what did you _think_ happened? Like… snakes shedding skin?”

He looks embarrassed, but, that’s actually a pretty accurate description of how he thought it worked.

“Oh…”

He sits next to her, and then takes her hand in his. “So… you’re okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You said your back hurt…”

“It does… Backache on day one, cramps…” she realizes that’s probably not specific enough, “abdominal cramps day two, and three and four are fine.”

“Four days?” He’s looking, and feeling, horrified at that.

“ _Sheds_ didn’t involve a duration?”

“NO!”

She’s looking up at him, feeling his mind and slow curdling sensation in his gut, and she starts to smirk. “You’re squeamish!”

“No! I’m…”

“You don’t like blood! The single most terrifying man in the galaxy gets sick at the sight of blood.” She can’t help it; she starts to giggle, flopping onto her side on his bed, curling around him, and _laughing_.

 

 

“I...” he glares at her. “I can take it when I’m fighting or angry. It doesn’t get to me then. But… There’s a reason for the lightsaber, beyond it being a good weapon. It cauterizes wounds as it creates them, so you don’t usually bleed with them.”

“So, you can lop off body parts and it’s fine, but blood gets to you?”

He rolls his eyes and shakes his head, and then hands over one of the protein bars. “You’re hungry, right?”

“ _YES_!” She pounces on it and tears into it. “I eat everything in sight the first two days, too, and tend to get annoyed easily the two days before.”

He nods, and puts that into things he should probably know, and answers her question as she gobbles the bar. “As Luke and Snoke taught it, there are light side skills and dark side skills and some that are in between. I’ve always been at best, mediocre, at any light skill, and probably the top of the light side skills heap is healing.

“I was working with Tash M’Gll.” He holds up his hand, takes off his glove, and pushes down his sleeve. His arm is just sitting there, looking like an arm. “Not a blemish or scar. She was good at it. She was good at any sort of light skill.” Rey can feel he still resents how easily Tash could do whatever Luke asked of her. “We cut ourselves, and she healed me up” he snaps, “like that. She could hook into her calm, feel the energies, and get them moving properly. A minute later the skin knits itself shut, and I’m fine. She cut herself, probably deeper than she meant to, and… she was really bleeding, and… I’m not good at calm in the best of circumstances, and it hurt more than she thought it would, so her panic bled into me. I took the cut no problem, because dealing with pain, at least the way I do it, is a dark skill, and I had that down better than anyone in my year, better than anyone at the school, so she probably wasn’t expecting it to _hurt_ because when she worked on me, I didn’t appear to be in pain. But it _hurts._ She’s starting to cry, and bleeding all over the place, and it’s all over my hands and our robes, and I can smell it, and then she’s sobbing, because I’m trying to get it fixed, but my hands are clumsy and slick and I’m hurting her worse, and I can’t get it stopped let alone the skin back together, and… Eventually, Luke took over, and got her fixed up, but… I don’t like blood.”

Rey can see how that might put a person off blood. She squeezes his hand. “I was still living in Niima. I’d felt off for a few days, thought I was getting sick, which was weird because I never get sick. I just don’t.”

“Light side. Your body takes care of you without even having to think about it.” He pulls her sleeve down and double checks… “When the guard got you, here,” his thumb rubs gently over the spot, “I felt it. Just the flash of it hit me.” He kisses her arm. There’s a tiny white line, and if he had to guess, he’d say it’ll be completely gone in another year or two. “Barely a scar.”   

She nods. “It was… ten years ago… eleven… something like that. I’d gone to bed feeling off, and woke up covered in blood, and thought I was dying. I think I screamed, because a few of the other women came, and told me what was happening, got me set up to deal with it.”

He looks at her. He can’t see anything different, but he can’t smell blood any longer, so obviously she’s _dealing_ with it.

“How… do you deal with it?”

“A little, soft plexiplastic cup.” She holds her fingers apart so he’s got an idea of the size. “You fit it inside of you, and it collects the blood. Pour it out before you go to bed and when you get up in the morning.”

He squirms a little. “There’s enough to _pour_?”

“The first two days. No so much the last two.” She finishes the first bar, and eyes the one he’s holding and not eating. He hands it over, _not_ hungry. “How’d you smell it? I’d barely started when you got near. _I_ didn’t know I was bleeding, yet.”

He half shrugs at that. “Defense mechanism. Certain smells, motions, emotions… They set my danger sense off. That’s one of them. Sometimes someone will try a stealthy attack. Creep up behind you, take out the guard silently. Sometimes they’ll succeed. Make no noise at all. But I’ll feel it. Smell the blood, feel the guard’s fear when he notices what’s up.”

“Oh.”

They sit quietly while she munches down the second bar.

When she’s done, he says, though he doesn’t have to, neither of them have felt the spark of new life, but it feels like the kind of thing he should say. “You’re not pregnant, then.”

“Yeah. That’s what that means. And you… took care of a long term preventative?”

He nods. “Med droid said it’d take two months to make sure no living sperm are lingering in my system. So, come New Year’s no more slicks.”

“Good.” She’s starting to understand why he’s not a huge fan of them. They aren’t horrible or anything, but without seems better.

He strokes his hand down her back, gently. “Can you… during…”

She arches an eyebrow at him. “I thought you didn’t like blood.”

“I don’t feel sick when I’m fighting, the emotions of the fight block it out. I imagine sex would work similarly.”

She laughs at that. “Not day two. Everything hurts on day two, and I don’t know about the rest of it.”

He kisses her shoulder. “Experiment tonight?”

“Sure, and if it hurts or you can’t take the smell or… whatever… we do something else?”

He wiggles his fingers at her. “Always an option.”

She smiles at him.

 

 

* * *

Every piece of fabric on the Supremacy is tagged with a day and its owner. That’s the only possible way for the laundry service to even get close to getting everyone the right bath cloths, bedding, and clothing.

And every day, the laundry service picks up anything with the correct tag on it, and sends it into the labyrinth system that is the Supremacy’s laundry rooms.

Kylo Ren and his cloths are no exception to this rule.

Because every piece of fabric is tagged, the laundry service is able to quickly, and easily, sort, pre-treat, and then launder everything, because, most of the time, laundry requires the same cleaning every week.

So, two bloody hand towels in his bath cloths, and his sheets, which are, suddenly, in significantly less tidy condition than usual, get some conversation because the usual treatment (toss with the rest of the black laundry) isn’t going to work.

The sheets get some smirking. Apparently the Supreme Leader has been enjoying himself, and from the looks of it, someone else, recently.

The hand towels get some worrying. That’s a _lot_ of blood.

For a while, the laundry workers wonder if Supreme Leader Ren had somehow damaged himself, but there are no reports of that. (Granted, the infirmary has no human workers, because that way there is _no_ gossip from them.)

And then they wonder if he damaged someone else… There’s not a lot of blood on the sheets, but some. And, especially among the people who used to do Hux’s laundry, that gets a _lot_ of gossip.    

Some of the staff, female members, have a different take on the story. Kylo Ren’s looking to make a baby Ren, otherwise his lady friend would be on a suppressor. After all, who menstruates if she doesn’t have to?

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I'm sorry, but vaguely squeamish Kylo Ren just amuses me to no end. I promise not to beat this dead horse too hard. :)


	4. Sleep

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two quick notes here. First off, I was listening to https://youtu.be/aQ3poU70uIE on loop when I wrote this. It's got a very nice flow for this piece.
> 
> Second of all, we've got some NSFW art here (non-smutty nudes) so if you're reading where you may have an extra set of eyes at your back... You've been warned. ; )

11/6/35

 

 _Done?_ Rey thinks to Kylo. Normally around now, she’d flash through to the Supremacy. Sometimes he comes to her, often if he’s had the sort of day where he wants to do something physically hard after, he’ll show up and help move rocks by hand. Moving rocks is boring, but it’s hard, and helps him burn off the jittery, got-to-move feeling he tends to get after long days of dealing with minutia.

But, on normal days, going to him works better.

She’s used to living rough, and she does have a tent and bed roll here, but having not done so for more than a year, she’s starting to appreciate things like climate control, and beds, and pillows.

And a functional bath/shower. Yes, she’s got the lake. The _cold_ lake. How it could possibly be this cold she doesn’t know. It doesn’t get below 30C here, but the lake feels like it’s barely above 4C.

Normally, when she thinks at him like that, he responds quickly. Like they’re just talking across a room, but she’s not getting any response. That brings up a quick spike of fear, but a moment of feeling lets her know he’s busy and frustrated, but not in any danger.

Another moment later she hears him in her head. _I wish. The R’Leah have offered us a compromise._

_Are you going to take it?_

She feels the wave of frustration. _That’s what I’m talking with my commanders about._

 _Ah._  

_We’ll be talking late._

_Okay._  She feels his mind ease away from hers.

 

 

* * *

He knows all of his commanders’ names by now. Kylo supposes that’s moving forward. More than half of them are new to him in the last year, having either recently been promoted or moved to the Supremacy to join his general staff. And, at any given time, he’s starting to feel… safer… about the situation. Some of them still want to kill him, but he’s got the sense that they’re getting less enthusiastic about it. 

Or they’re getting better at hiding it.

He’s laid out the issue, and is just letting them talk. Twenty voices have narrowed down to the eight with the most concise opinions.

“If we take the deal, other systems, more important ones, will start to test us, too.”

“We need the credits, my Lord. Offering us half of the taxes they owe, on the condition that we don’t cancel the contracts with the other companies they do business with is better than nothing.”

“And how many other systems will try to weasel out of their tax burden if we go along with this?”

“How many other systems will flat out attack us if we can’t keep producing weapons, which we’re not going to be able to do for all that much longer without income? Those droids we’re buying aren’t cheap. Some of the slavers are actually dropping old and infirm slaves on us to get new droids. Fuck, I got a report of out of Jurlgan IV that some idiot was trying to get us to take old livestock, claiming his dried up milk cow was a slave.”

“Tactically speaking, it’s a small enough system that we can dominate it militarily. It wouldn’t take more than fifty strategic hits with the city killers to destroy the civilian government, but keep a decent amount of the manufacturing in place.”

“And what do we do with it after we’ve dominated it? The idea is we want more resources, not to spend a huge pile of them keeping down a population that doesn’t want anything to do with us, and really won’t want anything to do with us after we’ve blown their capitol off the map.”

Kylo knows he can’t allow himself to show any weakness, but all he wants to do right now is drop his head into his hands and rub his temples.

It’s been about two hours since C8 told him the message had come through, and once he got it, he called his generals and admirals together, and they’ve been doing this ever since.

The offer is simple. R’Leah remits half of what they owe. The First Order maintains its boycott of R’Leah, and drops its boycott of anyone who does any business with them. They both get about half of what they want, but no one gets everything.

And Kylo’s got literally _no_ idea how to handle this. Everyone around him is making good points, and…

And he can’t afford to look weak.

And he can’t afford to lose credits.

And he doesn’t want… well, he knows he shouldn’t, just blow them out of the sky.

And he’s grinding his teeth so hard his head is aching.

 

 

* * *

People who think rain is romantic are maniacs.

At least, this is Rey’s current opinion on the matter. And this opinion may be informed by the fact that she’s outside, _camping_ in the rain. (Yes, she could be under the roof in her chapel, which would be dry, but the floor is a mosaic of small stones, so it’s hard, lumpy, and distinctly uncomfortable. Chewie’s due in a few days, and he’s bringing some pre-fab cottages, which will mark the beginning of the end of camping on Lirium.)

At Orlac’s school, there were wishy-washy little romantics that liked to wander about in the stuff, getting bedraggled and damp, and then go inside, dry off, put on dry clothing, and write or paint or sculpt about how moving the whole experience was.

But really, it’s just wet.

Cool and wet.

Cool, and clammy, and dripping through the fabric of her tent, making little puddles on her diner plate, running in a distracting rivulet down her back and across her cheek, and… It’d be one thing if she thought she might get something important out of lurking around in the rain, but all she’s getting from this is _wet._

She does it before she even really thinks about it.

Kylo’s room might be light-eating black, but it’s _dry._

It feels a little odd to be in there without him, and she’s half-thinking about letting him know she’s here, but… She doesn’t want to distract him. Even without intentionally brushing against his mind, she can feel his frustration.

Somehow, _I didn’t want to be wet_ , doesn’t seem to be on par with _I don’t know what to do about this stubborn system trying to goad me into a war._  

So, she pulls off her clothing, grabs one of his towels and dries off, and then settles into his bed with Orlac’s library. Time for her own frustrations.

The physical work of building her settlement is tiring, but good. Every day she’s a little closer to where she wants to go, and can see real, tangible improvement. Even if, like today, most of what she did was dig a drainage ditch so that her nicely laid floor doesn’t get washed to the far side of her chapel. (Yet, another reason she’s not a huge fan of rain. The stupid bloody stuff gets _everywhere._ Longer term, if it keeps raining, she’s going to have to dig the damn floor up again, lay plastcrete down, and then put the rocks in it, because she’s fairly sure that if the ground gets saturated, it’ll get saturated _under_ her dome as well as around it.)

But, at some point, theoretically, there will be other people here, and she’s supposed to have something useful to teach them.

So, part of every one of her nights is at least an hour reading about balance and the Force, and other religions and… Searching for a map, and if there isn’t a map to where she wants to go, at least locating the maps that lead to where she _doesn’t_ want to go will be useful.

Maybe inspiration for the right path isn’t in Orlac’s books, and a lot of what she reads makes her feel that way, but she can at least see where _not_ to go, and that has to matter for something.

 

 

* * *

“They want an answer in twenty-six hours.”

“We can have our entire fleet mobilized in twenty.”

“What about the ones on the border with the Unknown Regions? You can’t be suggesting we pull them out, can you? That’s something we’re doing people actually like.”

“Something they pay for, you mean.”

“Same thing.”

“What would mobilizing everyone cost?”

“As opposed to not mobilizing them?”

Kylo takes a breath. “We’re not mobilizing anyone or thing unless they actually attack us. Just not paying taxes isn’t enough.”

It’s the first thing he’s said in an hour, and it takes his commanders by surprise. They’d gotten to the point where they’d almost forgotten he was there. Actually batting around plans for an attack with some level of free range and orders beyond obliterate everything in your path is refreshing to them.

But, having reminded them that he’s there, they all react to it, pulling back a bit, looking at each other, desperately trying to figure out which of them should risk his neck by talking. Finally, the oldest of the bunch, General Kinear, says, respectfully, “My Lord, economic warfare will hurt us just as badly, if not worse, than a physical attack. If we allow them to behave like this, and do not offer some level of response, the entire galaxy will decide that they can starve us into submission.”

Kylo’s shoulders do not slump. Because that would be showing weakness and that he doesn’t know what to do next. That said, inside his head, he’s half hunched over and rubbing his temples, because he _doesn’t_ know what to do next.

Kinear catches the eyes of each of the rest of the general staff. He served under the Old Republic, Palpatine, and now the First Order. He is, as best he knows, the last officer left who’s military experience pre-dates the Clone Wars. He’s not, officially, the highest ranked person in the room besides Kylo, that’s Grand Admiral Schiff, but he’s got enough respect as a _professional_ and a _survivor_ that the others take his hint and shuffle out, allowing him a moment alone with Kylo.

Kinear, who’s ninety if he’s a day, maybe 1.6 meters, and possibly, soaking wet 55 kilos, bald above the largest, hairiest, whitest eyebrows Kylo’s ever seen, waits for them to leave, before standing up, striding over, pulling out the chair next to Kylo and settling himself down, facing Kylo.

His posture goes very informal. He’s relaxed and easy in the chair, but his voice stays polite, aware of Kylo’s rank. “My Lord, I understand not wanting to be Snoke. All in all, I think that’s a wise course, but this will cascade. The systems with the kind of wealth to remit the taxes you need, are wealthy enough they don’t _need_ what we can offer them. They can and will secure themselves. Or they’ll band together with each other to stand up against us. If you let one of them off easy, the others will flee, too.”

Kylo closes his eyes and bites his upper lip. “And if they go?”

“We can’t afford to keep flying. Not long term. We’ve got credits flowing out, but we’ve got to get them coming in, too.”

“And how much can they keep paying us if we attack them?”

“Enough. Spoils of war, my Lord. We take whatever we want. Strip those planets bare, drain the coffers of every business we don’t destroy, lay a levy on each person.”

“Give the Resistance another recruiting slogan and all 13 billion people who live in the R’Leah system.”

Kinear tilts his head, acknowledging that. “Or fight them with your purse. They’re trying to get you to bend on the boycott… Maybe it’s pinching enough. Maybe they’re close enough to the edge they’re offering this as a hope of saving face and getting some of what they need.

“But if they aren’t… This has to end, sir. Not today or tomorrow, but it can’t go past this week. The rest of the galaxy is watching, and they will act accordingly.”

“What would you do?”

Kinear thinks on it. “What do you want to get out of this, in the long run?”

“Credits.”

“Just credits?” Kinear’s not exactly being disrespectful, but Kylo can more than feel the _stop lying to me_ in that question.

Kylo blinks at that, too.

“We could have credits in minutes. You’ve heard us, we can mobilize enough of our fleet to beat them into submission before the end of tomorrow. Blow up one of their secondary planets, destroy their fleet, ring their home world with city killers, and in minutes they’ll transfer you every credit you could want. You’ve already said no to that. So, what do you _want_ out of this? All of us will do a better job as commanders if we’ve got an idea of what you’re trying to do with us.”

Kylo supposes that this is the sort of thing that would normally annoy him, but he’s tired enough right now, and honest enough with himself that… He needs the advice.

Kinear seems to sense it and offers him a bit of a smile. “If I may…”

Kylo can feel that Kinear’s attempting to offer him good advice without getting smacked for it. Kylo nods at him.

“Give it a night, sir. Get some sleep. Do… whatever it is you do… to clear your mind, and think on what you want out of this. You had a reason for taking over the First Order, and it had to be more than freeing slaves and revitalizing our weapons and tactics.”

Kylo doesn’t exactly smirk at that, but he has a feeling that Kinear would trip over his tongue if he said, “There was this girl…”

But there was a girl, and the Force, and a balance and…

“Snoke rose to stop the chaos, but he only made it worse. Instead of laws and order and a universe that worked… he just… killed people as it pleased him. It’s been chaos since Palpatine fell.”

Kinear smiles at that. And Kylo has the sense that he wants to call him _child_ or _lad_ as he says, “Sir, chaos is inevitable. I’ve lived through four regimes, you are my _fifth,_ and chaos is _always_ there. We can manage it, maybe tame it, hopefully use it to our advantage, but we’ll never banish it.

“Take your time, sir, and think on it. What are you doing?”

Gritting his teeth, that’s what he’s doing.

Kinear waits, patiently, and Kylo realizes he’s waiting to be dismissed. “Tell your men to be ready to mobilize, but not to do it, yet.”

“Good, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Kinear’s almost out when Kylo says to him, “General, why are you here?”

“How do you mean, sir?”

“You’re… ninety? Served with three masters before me… How did you get _here_?”

“Ninety-three. Here specifically, the New Republic wouldn’t give me a command when the civil wars heated up because I was too old. Snoke didn’t care if I was old, so here I am. Here in general, by being excellent at one thing, and only one thing. If you’ve got a problem, and it can be solved with an army, I _will_ solve it.”

Kylo stares at the old man in front of him, feeling bleak. “Can I solve this with an army?”

“Aye.” Kinear says with a smile, and a hint of warmth in his eyes. Kylo doesn’t know what accent just slipped out of him, but it’s not the one he normally uses. “You can solve any problem with an army. Make a whole mess of new ones, and if you’ve got enough army, you can solve them, too. Question is, should you, and I don’t know the answer to that. That’s not part of what I’m good at.” Kinear shakes his head, a little, and Kylo knows he’s lying, at least about not being good at it. He is, or at least he thinks, he’s telling the truth about the rest of it. “Figure out where you want to take us, and I’ll plot a course for you. I did it for the Senate, and Palpatine, and Snoke, and I can do it for you, too. Just give me the lay of the stars, and I’ll chart you a map.”

 

 

* * *

_What are you doing?_

There was a girl, and she mattered.

There was a father, and he’d killed him.

There was a master, and he was a liar.

There was the Force, and it screamed out, begging for balance.

And those four things came together in the touch of two hands, a voice in an elevator, and in front of the Master, and the ghost of a memory, and the truth out of lies, and the need for balance all lit up in her eyes and…

And that’s not a _fucking plan_ and it’s not a way to rule a galaxy and he’s been playing catch up for a year trying to figure out what the fuck to do with this fucking mess that he fucking grabbed a hold of because he couldn’t bear to see the light go out in another set of eyes that mattered.

Because there never was a _plan,_ not beyond the whisper of a vision of both of them, together, in a throne room, ruling side by side.

Just the ghost, the shape of it, solid, but not fleshed out, a painting, daubs and blobs of color wild and blurry, but the _shape_ was there. Him, standing slightly behind her, her seated on what had been his throne, now theirs, Lord and Lady Ren, together.

 

 

  

 

* * *

He looks to his bedchamber. He could meditate. He could try to quiet his mind and seek out some sort of guidance or plan.

But he knows what will happen. He’s too hot, too angry for it. Right now the only plans that will come to mind are the ones that have been surging in the back of his mind since he got this missive. Crush, destroy, kill.

He could do it easily. Not as easy as with Starkiller, but… He has the forces. He has the power. He _can_ level the R’Leah. Take them out of the galaxy completely. He can show off his power, and make the rest of the galaxy understand in one strike that they would be well advised to _not_ challenge the First Order. He may be more humane than Snoke, but he is not to be trifled with.

_You do what you do, and I’ll abide, or not, as I can._

He can feel her on the far side of the door and is glad she’s there. His hand rests on the plane of metal, about to hit the first of the spots he needs to touch to unlatch it.

He pulls his hand back. She wouldn’t abide this. It’d be one thing if they attacked him. If he were to utterly crush them as a matter of _defense_ that’d be fine.

He turns on his heel, fast, and stalks off toward his training gym. Meditation, thinking, everything has always worked better for him if he could _hit_ to go along with it, and this likely won’t be any different.

 

 

* * *

As a Jedi, fight training was painfully dispassionate.

They trained mostly against droids. The focus was primarily defensive. Use the training batons, and then, as Luke built more of them, lightsabers, to whack away little jolts of electricity.

The point of the Jedi’s physical body was to move the saber around in a defensive sort of way. And though they worked on both strength and flexibility, on the ability to _move_ fast and easy, their bodies weren’t weapons.

The saber, a thing distant from them, was the _weapon._

When he was thirteen, he and a few of the others convinced Luke to let them fight each other. The training droid was too predictable, too much a tool for a novice. And, as Kylo-who-was-Ben knew, training against the droid didn’t sharpen their skills at reading an opponent’s fight.

Fighting against people did.

There weren’t a lot of Jedi skills Kylo-who-was-Ben picked up readily, but lightsaber was one of them, and any opportunity he had to get better, he’d grab with both hands.

Here, now, in his training gym, he puts his lightsaber down. There are times for it. When flame and force and Force combine in a perfect symbiosis of rage and attack. Times like that are beautiful, and he loves them unreservedly. Those are the moments he’s _made_ for. This isn’t one of them.

When he joined Snoke, his fighting style changed. Kylo didn’t have to try to shove himself into a Jedi-shaped mold of dispassionate fighting. He didn’t have to distance himself from his weapon. He could be what he was, what’d he’d always been, and likely always will be, _the_ weapon.

His saber is just an aspect of that, an extension of his will to destroy.

He unfastens his tunic, hanging it up, and pulls his shirt over his head. For a moment, he wishes he had something to tie his hair back. It’s getting stupidly long, and he’s either got to do something with it when he fights or get it cut short again. Something else he doesn’t really have time for.

And since he doesn’t wear the helmet, keeping it short doesn’t matter that much.

C8 can likely locate some hair ties for him.

The training droids, something he can actually fight, as opposed to little electric currents he can swat away like so many annoying gnats, aren’t ready yet. _Soon_ supposedly.

Soon is too long away.

He goes to the punching bag. It’s old and heavy, made of thick leather and filled with… Whatever. He doesn’t know or care. It’s sturdy enough to take a punch, even one, or especially one, thrown by him.

It’s a good hit, jarring, satisfying. He feels the thrum of it all the way to his shoulder, feels his power, his dark, calling to him, begging to be released.

So he does.

Fist and foot, elbow and knee. No Jedi ever fought like this. There’s no serene elegance here. No distancing blade. Just a man and his rage and his dark, channeled into strikes that can shatter plasteel should he desire, though tonight he doesn’t. He’ll have to stop when he breaks the equipment, and he doesn’t want to stop, not yet.

He knows he’ll hurt when he stops, but he doesn’t care about that, either.

Hitting, hit hard, hit fast, hit deep and dark and bitter. Hit long enough and the problems don’t go away, but they don’t matter. Hit until he’s shaking, sweat dripping down his body, hair soaked. Hit until he can burn enough of his dark away to see…

Anything…

Any solution that doesn’t result in his enemies looking like the remains of the punching bag, broken and scattered across his gym.

 

 

* * *

He’s tired enough when he’s done he’s fairly sure he can sleep.

At least, that’s what he wants to do. Stagger off to his room, drop onto his bed, and not move until C8 reminds him of his first appointment of the morning.

He can tend to niceties like a shower, or taking off his boots, in the morning.

Except, as he’s about to flop boneless into the black bed that’s in his all black room, his unlit, black room, he feels the presence in there, and knows that there’s already someone in his bed, who may be somewhat irked to have 89 kilos of him just flop onto her.

His shoulders slump. If he gets a shower or undresses or… pretty much anything but collapses, his brain will start working again, and sleep won’t come.

If he doesn’t… He looks like a whomp rat who died in a swamp six weeks ago and, worse, smells like one, too.

He can’t see her in the dark. He’s got good dark vision, but even he can’t see someone in an unlit, black room. But he can feel her there, sleeping, but even in her sleep, welcoming, waiting for him to come join her.

 

 

* * *

Water. Hundreds of liters of it streaming down around him. Probably one degree shy of burning him. He didn’t bother to turn on the light, so he’s in the dark, feeling it pour over him, feeling sore muscles and joints thank him for doing this, even as they beg him to go lie down.

They all shriek in horror as he yanks the temperature to cold. And the only reason he doesn’t give voice to that yell is that he’s had decades of training of not allowing himself to show his pain.

He yells loud enough inside his head that he feels Rey wake up, though.

“Kylo?” she can’t see him, but she can feel him.

“Shower.”

The steam around him is rapidly clearing, taking the soft murk away from the dark, giving it clearer edges.

He hears her moving around, feels her placing her feet tentatively. She doesn’t turn on the light, and he appreciates that. His body’s unhappy enough with the shock of the cold water, adding searing light to it would just be punishment.

“Are you alright?”

“Enough.”

He senses her near, and feels the door to the shower open, followed by her hand entering and then a yelp. “Why is it cold?”

“Helps with bruises and swelling.”

“Why are you bruised and swelling? I thought you were meeting with your commanders?” He can hear the fear on her voice, both at what might have happened, and that, just a room away, she slept through it without coming to fight beside him.

“Training. I can focus the Force to hit hard, and it prevents most of the damage from doing so. No broken bones, for example, no torn ligaments, but I still end up bruised.”

“Oh.”

There’s a moment of nothing but dark and cold and the feel of warm, moist air running away from the bathroom as quickly as it can.

She doesn’t ask, but the opening to talk is there.

And it’s not the throne room of his vision, not the shape, not the feel, but he’s got the sense that it might be a step in getting there, so he lays it out, all of it, and, for the first time in… possibly ever, he opens up a problem, _all_ of the problem, from R’Leah to the wider galaxy, to keeping his position and _image_ among his officers, and explains what his options are, and _asks for help._

 

 

* * *

She can’t see him, but she can feel that this sort of thing is easier in the dark. Easier to just be two voices, two minds, floating along in shapeless black. Rey takes the time to think about what he’s told her, and finally says, “Kinear’s right. What are you _doing_ with this? None of the pieces will be shaped right if we don’t know what the whole looks like.”

She feels his sigh and hears the, “Buggered if I know.” But he does know, on the most basic of levels. “Surviving. If I screw this up too badly, they’ll kill me, and that’ll be that.”

That’s a squirm inducing thought. “You said you joined the Order to battle chaos… You’ve given your people the possibility of citizenship… Where does that go?”

His head is leaning against the side of the shower, and his body is all but numb now, so it’s likely time to step out, but… This is easier in the dark. Easier without his body being part of the situation. He slowly lowers himself down, sitting back against the wall of the shower, and lets the cold water continue to stream over bruised skin.

 

 

“C8 asked me why citizens… What it’s supposed to be… And all I’ve got right now is that it’s a way to get the Resistance off my back. It…” She can feel the way he’s working his lips, like his body actively fights letting these sorts of words and thoughts out. “buys me time.”

“To do what?”

He exhales, deep and ragged. “Get this in order. Take men like Hux out of the equation.” His voice drops, quieter, more thinking the words than saying them, “Get secure enough I can sleep at night without having to work myself insensate.”

She doesn’t move to touch him. He’s still in the shower, under icy, falling water, but he feels a gentle brush of her Force against him. “You don’t always have to guard your own sleep.”

He snorts at that, and she sees Luke looming over him.

“Not again, Kylo.”

She feels the little dismissive turn of his head. Ten years of fear don’t go away with a few words and weeks. So she moves onto a problem they might be able to solve sooner than later. Rey inhales deeply, thinking… “Buy yourself time…” Like any of Plutt’s scavengers, she was bound to him, could only trade her finds with him, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t see the other trading going on around her. Didn’t mean she doesn’t understand that the first offer is generally just there to feel the person out. “Did their 50% offer have a time frame?”

“No.”

“And why do they pay taxes to you?”

“It’s protection money. Theoretically: we protect them from anything that might cause problems. Practically: we don’t attack them if they pay us.”

“So you’re protecting them from yourself?”

“More or less. If something were to attack, we’d blow it out of the sky, but it’s a stable system in the core. No one’s so much as raised an eyebrow at it since the fall of the Empire.”

“Okay…” She’s still thinking.

He’s thinking, too, about where, supposedly, he’s taking all of this. “You told me about freeing slaves… Where did you want to go with that? Why even tell me about it? Just to see if I’d do it?” he asks.

That takes her by surprise. “I… I was thinking about balance and… How to sort out balance from permission to do any shitty thing you wanted to do. The Jedi path is easy. You’ve got a code, you know what to do and how, and you don’t have to worry about the implications of each act. As long as you’re in the right mindset when you do it, it’s fine. And… balance doesn’t give you that. So, where’s the line between good and evil and… And what do you do with power… And…”

“And you came up with something you’d do with power?”

“Yeah. Or, more importantly, I came up with the idea that if there’s a shot of you fixing a problem, you can’t just sit on your butt and not fix it. That, that’s a difference between… whatever I am and the Jedi. So, problem. And, at least through you, I had a shot of fixing it. So, I asked.

“I don’t have any… grand vision of this… It was just, something that could make life better for a lot of people.”

“Maybe…”

“Spoken like someone who’s never been a slave,” her voice is sharp on that.

“Spoken like someone who’s aware of how many half to two-thirds starved, infirm, or near-dead people are being tossed on my doorstep. If I’d just ended it… They’d be begging on the streets, likely dying there.”

“Oh… I didn’t realize that’s what you’d meant.”

And again she feels his little dismissive gesture. She spends another moment thinking, sitting back against the bathroom wall, feeling her way through the dark. “What do you think they’re hoping to get out of this?”

“The R’Leah?”

“For right now, yes. Your officers are probably a different conversation for another night.”

He thinks about that, too, and realizes that’s a bigger question than one answer. “Ultimately, or by this offer?”

“Either, both… Why do this in the first place? How much are you charging them?”

“Enough so that it matters to their balance sheet. Not so much they’re in danger of going broke from it. Snoke’s accountants figured out how much a system, on average, given its size and danger level, would spend on its own military protection, and then set their tax rate at ten percent above that.

“The First Order would show up, destroy their local military, take over ‘protection’ duties, and then they’d pay us for it. It’d keep them complacent, and make sure that most of the systems he controlled couldn’t get into fire fights with each other, or go up against us.”

“So, you think they’re looking to save money?”

“Maybe. Or get out from under us. Possibly both.”

“And what do you get out of this?”

“Not so much that losing just them will break me.”

“Losing everyone who sees them walk away is the problem?”

“Yes.”

“And, ‘Okay, you can go, just don’t tell anyone what you did,’ isn’t going to work.”

He almost laughs at that. “I’d be extremely surprised if it did.” She feels him shrug. “I also don’t have anyone I can use to give them that offer. Not only would the entire outside galaxy have to not know about it, but somehow my people couldn’t find out about it, too.”

“Your commanders would read it as a sign of weakness.”

“Yes. Some of them are keen on diplomacy, about half of them think the answer to everything is kill whoever causes problems.”

“And they get irked when you suggest diplomacy?”

“That’s one way to put it.”

She keeps feeling, him, them, this situation. “Are you… looking for my permission to attack them?”

 _Yes._ But he doesn’t say it. “It would certainly make things easier,” comes out of his mouth.

“I’d rather you didn’t.” _Please, don’t._

He can feel there’s a lot of depth to that. Not only would she, just as a matter of course, prefer him to come up with a different response, but that she wants to stay with him, she cherishes this time, and doesn’t want to lose it.

But there was a girl, and a balance, and if she goes along with something like this, the balance starts to tip.

“I know.” _I won’t._

Rey asks, “What happens if you take the deal they’re offering? I mean… with your men. Not the wider galaxy.”

“They go along with it, and instead of two of them plotting to kill me, I think I end up with three. Maybe a fourth when more of my systems revolt. Again, screw this up too badly, and sooner or later, one of them will keep his thoughts tightly reined enough to kill me. Or… worse, I suppose, he’ll gain enough support that they just won’t take orders from me anymore. Even if I could kill my entire command, which is unlikely, I can’t run the damn thing without them.

“And if I keep my men in order, but enough systems revolt, I’ll end up having to fire on them, because sooner or later one of them will decide to _take back_ what they’ve paid and then some. But I’ll have to make that attack with fewer resources and less chance of success than if I’d put the first one down and kept up my tax revenues.”

They’re both quiet for a long moment after that, then Rey says, “Do they have something you need that they don’t value as much as credits? Raw materials or… Something they can give you, so you get goods if not income, and they save face by you making a deal?”

Kylo thinks about that. He needs practically everything to keep his empire flying. A system would be hard pressed to not have _something_ he could use. “Maybe. I can find that out. Is that what you’d suggest?”

“A counter offer of some sort. That’ll buy you time. Take… ships or… food… or… whatever. Make them pay for your recruiting stations.”

“And if Kinear’s right about them being on the edge of collapse because of my boycott of their suppliers… That’ll increase the pressure on them, but I’m still negotiating with them…” He lets himself feel that, and decides that, at least for right now, for this moment in time, it will work.

He hefts himself up, and shuts off the water. Maybe he doesn’t yet have an answer for his bigger question, but at least for a moment, the smaller one can be satisfied.

He hears Rey move, still can’t see her, but senses her in front of him. He feels her call a towel to hand, and knows she’s offering it to him.

He dries himself off, gingerly. He’s long past the endorphin rush of his fight, and even with chilled skin everything is still sore.

“Come to bed, Kylo.” Her fingers find his. 

 

 

* * *

When he was with Luke, sometime around the age of sixteen, some of the other young Jedi began bed-hopping. Kylo-who-was-then-Ben wasn’t the oldest of the lot, M’Gll was six weeks older than he, but that put him at more than close enough to the oldest of the lot.

But, for the boys, Ben was the oldest of the lot, so whatever “stages” the Padawans were going through, he went through them first. (Generally speaking, the vagaries of puberty were just as vague for Luke’s school as they are at every other school.) And Ben never went through a bed-hopping phase.

Like every other non-asexual human male, Ben hit puberty and more or less turned into an erection on legs for the next few years. And he literally, figuratively, and metaphorically did everything he could to beat those desires into submission hard as he could. Sex was, at least according to Luke, an invitation to the kind of emotions that thrived in the dark, so it was the province of only the most accomplished masters, fully and truly grounded in their light. And of all Luke’s students, he was the one who could least afford a dalliance with the dark. So, he behaved, and kept to the rules, and slept in his own little cottage, by himself, and generally did a fairly good job of not being a walking erection much past the age of fifteen.

But not all of the other Padawans did.

And like most young people forced into unwanted chastity, they had an extremely strict and limited definition of sex that covered, basically, nothing of the feast that is sex, and allowed them room to play. Maybe all of the Padawans were _technically_ virgins, but that _technically_ involved stretching the definition of what constituted ‘not sex’ to the snapping point and then just a hair beyond.

And thus, bed hopping. It either didn’t occur to Luke to do bed checks, or he knew what was going on and figured that some level of blowing off steam was necessary to keep his students from exploding. Kylo doesn’t know the truth of that.

Ben wasn’t anyone’s best friend. The other Padawans rarely confided in him, but he wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t deaf, and they’d still whisper and talk, and gossip and…

Anyway, all of this has been the ‘round about way of explaining that, sometime around his seventeenth birthday, Kylo-who-was-then-Ben had more than heard the rumors about how _nice_ it was to sleep with someone else. 

And, as someone who wasn’t much past the walking-erection stage of life, he could understand, in hot, red, shameful, do it fast, get it done, and then feel bad about it later sorts of way, how _nice_ it would be to have someone _touch_ you. That part of the bed-hopping he understood on a visceral level, and very much didn’t want to. But, the sleeping part…

He didn’t get the sleeping part. It seemed… claustrophobic, really. Too much, too close, too little space, and, of course, at Luke’s school, it was just as likely that you’d end up with visitors in your dreams if they got too close and… And he didn’t get it.

But right here, right now, in a black room, after a long conversation, and no sex, he’s starting to get it.

He’s tired. He’s sore. He wants the comfort of another body, another soul near his. And for once, his mind is quiet enough that he’s fairly sure sleep will find him, without him having to hunt it down and kidnap it. For the first time in a long time, Kylo slips into sleep without hours of meditation, or the soporific of orgasm to lead him there.

 

 

 

* * *

In the morning, he sends the R’Leah a counter offer. Seventy-five percent of their taxes this year, fifty next year, thirty the year after, payable in credits or raw materials. At the end of three years, they’ll reassess the value of the tax base. A piece of prime, already developed real estate of at least three hectares square, with an assessed value of not less than 6.5 million credits in each of their cities with a population of more than 5,000,000, for recruiting stations. Full title and sovereignty to two of their uninhabited, undeveloped, extreme outlier planets. And for all of that, they’ll end the boycott on both R’Leah and anyone they do business with.

He gets word back, practically before he sends the deal out, that it’s been accepted. Details of where and how, pending.

And when he tells his commanders about it, more than half of them, including Kinear, seem to think he made a good decision.

 


	5. Eat and Learn

11/1-30/35

 

“If you don’t like it, why do you do it?” Rey asks as Kylo starts his morning shave.

He’s feeling rather grumpy. He’s finally, sort of, most nights, sleeping for more than three hours and his body has responded to this by _begging_ him for _more_ sleep, and now when he wakes up he feels dead on his feet, eyes and joints glued shut, and loathing any and everything that pulls him out of his bed. So, right now, just about everything in the morning annoys him, and having to rasp a blade over his face is just the top of the pile of his morning shit list. So, he’s annoyed about having to shave, and not looking forward to the rest of morning, where he gets to go to more meetings and try to somehow make this fucking regime work. “You don’t have to comment on _every_ thought I have,” snaps out of him.

 

 

Meanwhile, right little Rey of sunshine is looking up at him, insufferably perky in the morning, because she gets to go do _fun_ stuff today.

“Well, if you weren’t thinking about it so loudly, I wouldn’t have said anything.”

She’s leaning against the sink, cleaning her teeth, as he’s standing in front of it, holding his razor, about to shave. He glances at his razor, and then glances back at her, and back to the razor, which he doesn’t really like at all.

“You’re the man in charge now, it’s not like you’ve got to make yourself look a certain way to please anyone else.”

He sighs. That’s not why he shaves, even though he doesn’t enjoy doing it.

She reaches over and lightly touches his chin, which is rough with stubble. “It doesn’t stay that rough, does it?”

“No. It’ll get fairly soft. Not like my hair, but, softer than most beards.”

“You’ve grown it before, then?”

“A master could have a beard. That was… part of the look.” He rolls his eyes viciously and begins to shave, almost taking a chunk out of his chin before he makes himself focus and calm. “But it doesn’t come in all that well other than my chin and neck and mustache area.” He taps his cheek between his ear and jaw. “Five long, scraggly hairs there does not a beard make.”

She gets a flash of him, impossibly young, younger than he was when Luke attacked him, _trying_ to make himself look like Master Ben. Trying to _be_ Master Ben. 

“I shaved it off when I changed my name.”

“Oh.”

 

* * *

If asked, Kylo is aware of the concept of poverty. He knows it’s a thing. He knows that a decent number of people joining the First Order are doing so to get out of it. He’s just… sketchy… as to what’s actually involved in being poor.

It’s not anything he’s ever really seen or felt or been near beyond say, walking through a poor town, or being told that not everyone has enough to eat, so…

He just doesn’t know.

And it’s not even anything he’s ever given much (any) thought to until his third or fourth real meal with Rey, the first one that required cutlery, when he notices that she doesn’t know how to use a fork.

It’s not that she can’t stab her food and shove it into her mouth. It’s that that’s exactly what she’s doing. She’s got her hand wrapped around the whole of the end, it’s in her fist, and she is stabbing her food with it.

And this is when it occurs to Kylo that no one ever _taught_ her how to use one, and that it’s entirely likely that she may have never, before her time where the books were, ever had a meal that required one. And that’s where the vast, gaping chasm between anything he may have ever imagined poverty to be, and what it actually is, becomes achingly clear to him.

He reaches out to gently show her how to hold it, and she glares at him, hard, before he gets his fingers halfway to where she is. So he stops, raises his hands in a _peace_ gesture, very much does not sarcastically think something along the lines of _if you want to eat like a savage, more power to you_ and she very much does not think something like _fuck you and your fancy manners, your lordship._ And he doesn’t almost smile at that because it reminds him of a moment of his… joking with his mother, irritated, but not angry, because he didn’t know something that was second nature to her.

But the next few days, he eats carefully, and slowly, and she picks up his table manners, which are more formal and finicky than most, but that’s what happens when the person teaching you to eat was trained to flow through political circles from her girlhood and expected him to be able to do so, as well.

 

 

* * *

It’s probably their twentieth meal together, maybe a bit more, maybe a bit less.

Breakfast. C8 knows to leave a tray, with coffee, whatever breakfast is (He tells the chef to just give them a large portion, say 2000 calories, of whatever he’s making for himself for breakfast and dinner, and at least as of this point, it’s been something different every day.), and a datapad with whatever he’s got on his schedule for the day at his door.

Today it’s coffee, porridge of some sort of grain with spices and dried fruits, and eggs next to it cooked with a smoky-salty meat mixed into it. Normally, they eat from the plate together.

He rather likes it, and it looks like Rey does, too. And she does normally eat less than he does, but she’ll normally get almost half the plate and he’ll usually wrap up the rest of it.

But today she’s had about a quarter of the food on the plate.

“Don’t like it?” he asks.

“No, it’s fine. I’m just not hungry.”

He nods and continues on with his breakfast.

A moment later, he’s staring at the food still on their plate. He’s eaten his ‘comfortable’ amount, and she doesn’t appear to be in any hurry to eat what’s left, so he does what he’s been trained to do since he was a child, and keeps going, working on finishing the plate.

He’s about three bites into what she hasn’t finished when Rey says to him, “Why are you still eating?”

He’s staring at her like this is blatantly obvious. “There’s food on the plate.”

“I know. But you aren’t hungry.”

He doesn’t have to dig deep into her mind to find a million memories of clawing hunger. “You’re going to tell me to _waste food?_ ”

“Uh…” She blinks, and then pokes a little in his, because she can’t relate how both of them, full, on a ship, secure in not just the next meal, but the one after that, and after that, and after that, fits with eating beyond feeling full. She does have to dig a bit to find a series of nannies lecturing a young Ben about how some people don’t have enough to eat so he should always clean his plate. She sniggers. “Spoken like someone who’s never been hungry. Like someone who’s never looked at a person with enough fat on them to jiggle when they’re just scraping by. Eating when your body doesn’t need it _is_ wasting it.”

Kylo blinks, he’s never even begun to think of it that way.

Rey takes the plate. “I’ll take it back with me, eat it as a snack, or add it to the compost pile. Something that needs the calories can have them.”

 

* * *

At meals they don’t just learn about each other, but also about themselves. For such a long time, neither of them really ate. Kylo had his collection of protein bars and tubes of vitamin mush. Rey had her portions. Same thing, every night, every day, over and over and over.

The portions kept Rey at just a hair above the amount of food she needed to keep going. Any less and she’d have been losing weight. Kylo ate exactly the amount of calories the med droids said he needed to keep his body in the shape it was in, and not a bite more. Eating involved indulging his wants and he may have been _allowed_ to do that with Snoke, but he still had the feeling that indulging any want beyond anger and violence was a shameful thing, so, whatever the minimum amount of food he needed was, he ate it.

So, neither of them actually know what they like to eat. And each new meal is opening up not just the idea of food as something with interest and variety, but also a source of pleasure beyond sating a need.

That said, unlike sex, where they’re fairly in sync on what constitutes pleasure, food is different.

Tonight the chef has made them a mix of vegetables and broth and… Rey has no idea, whatever those things are, they do not live on Jakku. It’s some sort of ocean-going creature. It had eyes and wiggly bits, and all of those eyes and wiggly bits are very much eyes and wiggly bits and are not, in any way, camouflaged into the rest of the meal. Each one is about the size of her thumb, and they’re awfully tasty, and she’s happily slorping them down with a little sucking sound because they’re kind of squiggly and soft, and a few little hums of pleasure, because they just taste _good,_ and Kylo actually bolts out of the room because if he watches her snarf down another eyeball on a stalk while grinning at him because they’re so yummy, he’s going to be sick.

Apparently, blood is not the only thing that makes him squeamish. Which, not only did she not know about him, but he didn’t know about him, either.

They learn that while Kylo will eat meat, and fish, and honestly, just about anything put onto a plate in front of him, he would deeply prefer not to be able to identify what creature it came from just by looking at it. (Rey finds it amusing that he’s got enough empathy for their dinner that if he can imagine it alive, he doesn’t want to eat it. He glares at her, and pushes his half of the frennian game hen to her, pulling her potatoes to him.)

Rey meanwhile will happily eat just about anything, looking at her or not, but she does _not_ like anything that’s too spicy-hot, and whatever that herb is that makes everything taste like soap. (The only reason Kylo believes her about the soap thing is that he can share how it tastes to her. She’s rather jealous about the fact that it does _not_ taste like soap to him.)

If there is meat in a meal, Kylo prefers it well-done. (He does not like his food to jiggle. Likewise he’d prefer it not squish between his teeth. That texture just puts him off.) Again, this is an area where Rey doesn’t have much preference. It’s possible there will be a time when a texture gets to her, but so far, it hasn’t happened.

If it were entirely up to Kylo, most of the food would likely be vegetarian. (Properly cooked vegetables do not jiggle or squish. And while he may not like everything the chef makes, it’s always properly cooked.) Rey would prefer that at least some meat show up in every meal. It’s satisfying in a way veggies and synth-protein just aren’t. (And, again, if it weren’t for the fact that Kylo can literally feel it’s true, he wouldn’t believe it, but… It is true. She can go longer between meals if there is real meat in them.)

They’re halfway into their thirtieth or fortieth meal together, and his fork is halfway to his mouth as he’s digging into a vegetable and nut mix with lots of noodles in a sweet-sour sauce that they both like, really enjoying it, when Rey asks, “So… no meat?”

“Not in the house I was raised. It wasn’t forbidden. My—he ate meat. My mother probably did, too, when she was away. But it wasn’t part of Alderaan’s culture, so my mother’s staff never kept it in the house. Then Luke’s: eggs, dairy, the occasional cock, usually cooked into a stew. All of the animals were worth more as milk, eggs, or fiber producers than as meat. So, we rarely ate them.”

“We’d get portions. That’s what Plutt’d call them. One portion was about a full day’s worth of food. Maybe a day and a half if you were small. They came in little packs. You’d rip them open, dump it in a mug, mix in your water, which you also got paid in, and then it’d bubble up and cook itself. One lump of food. Sort of halfway between your protein bars and bread.”

“What did they taste like?”

Rey has a hard time answering that. She _knows_ what it tastes like, but translating it… She lets the flavor, smell, and feel of it fill her head. He nods, letting the sense of it fill his own head. It’s not bad, but he wouldn’t want to live on it. She smirks at that. “That’s how I feel about your protein bars.”

 

* * *

Women are _different._

He feels a little stupid to just be figuring this out at the age of thirty, but… He’s never had what anyone could come even close to calling an intimate relationship with one before.

The eight years he lived with his mother… near his mother… sometimes. She was gone more than she was home, and that’s not an intimate relationship.

Training, on and off, for four years with Phasma did not an intimate relationship make.

And his two female knights spent just as much time, if not more, swathed in black, and hidden behind a mask as he did. The mask made it easier to live with having failed at being Master Ben Solo, after all, if he ever caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror or window, he didn’t have to see his own face. He imagines they found a similar solace in their masks, too.

He wonders if that’s part of not begrudging Rey the scar she left on his face. He never glances at himself and sees Ben, not anymore.

But he does glance at her, a lot, and see this _person,_ who’s just _different._

She’s so _small._ As they spend more time together, just in the same place, and touching, he gets a vibrant sense of her body against his, and casual things, like when he’s spooned up behind her, that that tip of his elbow can rest at the crest of her hip, and his fingers can wrap around the top of her shoulder, hammer home how _small_ she is. Her whole torso fits into the length of his forearm.

She smells really different. And, yes, Rey’s a person, who often does really hard work, outdoors, in the hot, humid summer sun, so she doesn’t always smell _good._ There have been more than a few days where getting into the shower is the first thing on the list of what they’re doing. But she always smells _different._ When he’s been working hot and hard and sweaty, he feels like he smells like something that died in a hot, humid place. She just smells sharp and sour. And when she’s clean, or they’ve been taking an easy night, or touching each other, she smells like herself, sometimes stronger, other times fainter, but it’s a very _right_ smell. He likes how, if he doesn’t get a shower in the morning, he can smell her skin on his throughout the day.

And she’s _smooth._ Not her hands and feet, they’re rough with callouses, but the rest of her… Her skin, her hair, it’s all so smooth. He’ll spend hours, often when she’s asleep, just stroking her skin, feeling it under his fingers, and how he’s never touched anything this smooth before. Not anything alive, that is. He’ll spend moments, when they’re awake, trailing his lips and cheek and tongue against her skin, just reveling in how _smooth_ it is. 

And stroking her skin leads him to another difference. She’s curvy. The round of her breast, the jut of her nipples, the dip of her solar plexus curving into the gentle swell of her belly. Her hips curve out into a line that feels like it was just made for his palm, swell into the round of her bottom, dip down into the long convex plane of her thigh or slip up to the concave line of her back.

And for as much as he’d prefer that his food not jiggle, he could happily watch all of her curves jiggle all day long.

And if said curves are jiggling, say with the extremely pleasant sway of her body on top of or under his, he finds himself contemplating how soft she is. How his hand can squeeze around one of those curves and feel the soft, gentle give of her flesh. There’s hard, taut muscle under all of those curves, but her hard strength is covered over with a soft, smooth layer on top, and though he’s not nearly philosophical enough to enjoy this sort of thought while he’s squeezing one of those curves, later, when she’s sleeping next to him, he knows that her body is a metaphor for her spirit, a strong, solid core with a soft, gentle, golden-flushed layer on top. He wonders if that means his spirit is pale, and hard, and scarred. (And, though it’s a thought he won’t allow himself at any time other than when he’s almost asleep and his guards are down, he wonders if there won’t, perhaps, be a time where that’s not true.)

And later, when they’re lying together, when their bodies have cooled, and she’s asleep, she fits against him so perfectly. The back of her and the front of him, and a smooth, gentle line of breath and touch… He hasn’t written anything in years, but it almost makes him wish he had his calligraphy set, if for no other reason than to trace that curve onto paper, and then tuck it into his tunic, worn against his chest, keeping it close to his body at all times.

 

 

* * *

Women are different. He’s enjoying learning that immensely.

But they’re also not _that_ different.

“Why don’t you have hair here?” he asks a few days later as they’re lying in bed together, and he’s gently stroking his fingers over her underarm. They shower together almost every day, and he’s never seen her shave, and he can’t imagine she waits to shave until she’s on Lirium and her near-frozen lake. Not when he’s got uncountable liters of hot water here.

She rolls her eyes a little at that. “Hair on Niima is… problematic. Mites. Little insects eat skin cells, and live in dark places, and their eggs stick to hair. I got a bad case of them when I was younger, and had to take everything off to get rid of them.”

He winces at that.

“Once the hair’s off, they don’t have anywhere to lay eggs, so all you’ve got to do is kill the ones on your skin, and you’re free of them. It takes about ten days.”

That gets a harder wince as he imagines shaving his entire body every day for ten days. In a desert. With no water. “Everything?”

“The only hairs on my body were my eyelashes. And in really bad cases, people will take them off, too. Otherwise you might go blind.”

Kylo’s almost thinking that destroying Jakku was worth it just to eradicate those bugs. He traces his fingers across her underarm, and gently rubs her leg with his knee. “So, you shave? I’ve never seen you shave.”

She shakes her head vehemently. “You don’t shave in a desert if you can avoid it. I built a laser device. It zaps the hair off. Keeps it off for a few months.”

He perks up at the idea of that. Because if he could take care of his face once every few months… “Could I…”

“Sure. If you want. It stings a bit.”

“What’s a bit?”

“You try it and see. A bit. Enough I do my underarms and legs, but nothing too sensitive.”

“Why’d you keep doing it after you got rid of the mites?” He doesn’t have a lot of experience with female bodies, but the few he’s gotten close to had their body hair, or most of it.

“It feels nice. So much of Jakku was harsh and rough, and… this isn’t.”

He kisses her underarm, and her ribs, and hip, and then along her leg. “It does feel nice.” He shifts up a bit and kisses her muff. “Not so nice here?”

“No, the zap’s too strong for that. And you have to shave at least once, otherwise the hair on top of your skin catches fire.” He feels a flush of horror at how she must have learned that. “And if you shave there…” She thinks about it. “Have you ever gotten sand in your shorts?”

“Thankfully, no.” Though the idea of it makes him squirm.

“It’s an experience I could have skipped, too.”

 

 

* * *

He’s looking at the little plexicup. It’s been sitting in its bag, on the shelf, in his bathroom since Rey finished with it, and he’s just… curious… about it.

She sees him eyeing it as he’s brushing his teeth at the end of the day.

“You can look at it. It won’t bite you.”

He half shrugs.

She goes, takes it out of the bag, grabs his hand, and dumps it on his palm. “See, just soft, clear plexiplastic. Poke it a little, it’s squishy.”

He does, feeling like this is probably the single most surreal experience of his life. But, it is kind of squishy, and the rim is a little firm, and it’s bigger than he thought it’d be, but still fairly small and… “Can you… feel it… you know…”

“Sometimes. Depends on the cycle. Some of them are really annoying and everything is sore, and, yes, I can feel it then. Other cycles, no.”

“So… it’s not the same, each time?”

She shakes her head. “It’ll generally last about the same amount of time. And it’ll generally come every twenty-sevenish days, but that means anywhere between twenty-five and thirty. I usually know when it’s getting close by how I feel. But each one has different feelings.”

“Physical or emotional?”

“Both. I didn’t get my usually crabby and annoyed right before this last cycle, but my breasts were tender.”

He pokes it again, and looks at it. “How do you get it out?”

She touches the little nub at the bottom, and pinches it with her thumb and forefinger. “It’s easier if you squat. Same with putting it in.” She shows him how she folds the rim. “And in it goes.”

He’s still looking at it like he might have to drop it fast so that it doesn’t attack him. Then he looks at her, and she feels him sort of mentally blush all over.

“You’re thinking loudly,” that seems to be a good way to indicate she knows what he’s thinking, and he can ask, without, like she had before, just picking the thought out of his head.

He bites his lips, rolling them together, not really sure if he wants to ask, but… He knows where it goes, so… “Does putting it in feel good?”

“Doesn’t feel like much of anything…” She tries to think of any experience he might have that’s even remotely similar. “Like… when you shake it off after you pee. That doesn’t feel good, right?”

He quirks a fast smile, handing her the plexicup back. “Generally, no. Though there was a joke that used to go around the boys at Luke’s school. If you shake it more than twice, you’re playing with yourself.”

She giggles a little about that, but feels there’s some tension in that line.

 

 

* * *

In bed, she asks him, “Did you used to… play with it… a lot?”

It’s dark, so even if he weren’t curled up behind her, she wouldn’t be able to see his face, but she can feel his expression, that tense, lip rub he does when he doesn’t exactly want to say whatever it is.

“What’s a lot?”

She’ll admit that’s not the focus she was aiming for with that question, but… “Uh… I’d do it every night or so, so… more than that?”

“Every night?” He’s stunned at that.

“It’s good for going to sleep. Or… I mean… It works that way for you, right?”

He’s still trying to wrap his mind around _every_ night. “Every night?”

“Well. Not every single night, but… most of them, yes.” She rolls over to face him, and then catches what he’s thinking, and… “Oh. Uh… No one ever told me not to. It was just… a way to go to sleep, nicely.”

He blinks, slowly, and his lips rub together again. “It’s not that… The… sex part… wasn’t that big of a deal. I don’t think Luke cared much one way or another if we… But we were trying to be calm and serene and passionless and… We weren’t supposed to _want_ things. Masters… well-grounded in the light… could ‘physically commune together in mutual accord and affection,’ but...” He places her hand on his shaft, right now it’s just lying between them, not doing much of anything. “For a few years there, it was more or less always hard, always wanting, and it was… annoying, really. Anything… _anything_ could set it off, and… it didn’t matter what I was trying to do, there’d just be this constant, clawing _want_ and… And we’re not supposed to give into our wants. We’re supposed to meditate, and calm ourselves, and control our desires, master them, and… And all it wants is to fuck. _All_ the time. Anything even vaguely female and human. And, of course, everyone around me can feel my desires because just about the time it woke up and decided what it wanted, my ability to keep my feelings hidden also went to shit.” He rolls his eyes. “Luke said that was a normal part of puberty, but,” he shakes his head. “And the others got there sooner or later, but I was the oldest of the boys, so I got there first. Then, the others start to catch up, so it’s not just me. There’s three other pubescent kids, and that’s a lot of wanting flowing around, and... of course, just like they could feel me, I can feel them, so now it’s not just _my_ wants, I’ve got all of theirs sloshing around and… And Luke’s telling Yoda about it. He’s laughing, and Luke’s muttering about how his hair is turning gray and he’s not training anyone under twenty ever again.”

Rey’s trying not to laugh, because living through it wasn’t funny, but, like Yoda, she’s sniggering a bit.

Kylo rolls his eyes again. “So… not a lot, not by your scale, but it felt like I was doing it a lot more than I should have.”

She kisses him. “I’m sorry.”

That gets an eye roll, too. “Uh huh.”

“Hey… I can think it’s funny and still wish you didn’t have to go through it.”

He accepts that. They’re quiet for a moment. Then he says, “So… you just… did it whenever you liked?”

“Pretty much. I lived alone, so it’s not like there was any reason not to. But… I generally didn’t want to unless I wasn’t doing something else.”

“I’d have had an easier time if that’s how it worked. I could have kept myself distracted. But… Making dinner, cutting up peaches, doing fine, paying attention to the knife and the fruit, talking a little, then… wait… The peach is ripe and soft and juicy and… Gosh… it feels good against my fingers and in my hand… It’s got a nice, soft, supple give to it… And… It’s about the size of M’Gll’s breast, and maybe I could steal off and pick one later, and… Now everyone else is staring, including M’Gll, perfect, calm, serene, never, ever wanting anything, M’Gll, and I just want to die because apparently I just blasted that feeling to everyone near me. And now, not only am I randy, because my shaft _still_ hasn’t gotten the go-back-to-sleep message, but I’m also boiling with shame, and I’m angry because she’s glaring at me, and they’re all staring, and I just want to curl up and vanish or kill all of them, and, wait, yes, that feeling also just went thundering through the room, so half of them are terrified now, ready to run away, and…  It’s a mess.”

Rey winces. “Ouch.”

He nods. “Yeah.”

“Did she… like you?”

He laughs at that. “No. Never. She was afraid of me at first. And I didn’t… like her… I didn’t. I really didn’t. We had no common interests and mostly just annoyed each other. But she was female and my age, and the only one of the girls who had any sort of… body… visible under her robes and… I didn’t want to be having thoughts like that about her. She was too… light, to hate anyone, but she pitied me for being dark, and honestly, that was worse. I can take hate, but, ‘Luke’s poor nephew, just can’t help it, doesn’t belong here…’ not that. And that was what she told herself to get over the fact she was afraid of me. Eventually she got over her fear, but she was never easy around me. She marked me as an enemy the first time we met, and that was that. And me being the fruit-fucking maniac thinking of her naked didn’t do anything to improve her opinion of me.”

“Wait… did you… with a peach?”

“Does that… shock…” she can feel the word he’s thinking is _disgust_ “you?”

Rey thinks about it, not shocked, not in a bad way, mostly just curious, not exactly grasping the mechanics of how it would work, likely because she’s a bit vague on what, exactly, a peach is. “Did it feel good?”

Kylo’s very relieved that she’s not disgusted. “Better than I expected. It’s got to be really ripe, though. Not the sort of thing I could do often. They’re only that sort of ripe for a few weeks.”

“How… Like…” She knows peaches are round, and about a handful, and apparently somewhat soft and juicy, and has a mental image of him just rubbing against one, but she’s sure that can’t be right.

“Take a spoon, scoop the pit out, hold it in your fist, and… it worked.” He flashes her the image of the hollowed out peach. _That_ makes a lot more sense. “Messy… but it worked.”

And like that, she can imagine it does work. She leans up for a moment, taking the pillow from under her head, rolls over again, so she’s back to him, and folds it in half, stuffing it between her legs. “I’d rock against it, do it until everything feels good, and fall asleep hugging it.”

He strokes her back. “Were you thinking about anyone when you did it?”

“Not usually. Just how it felt.”

“Usually?”

Her turn to roll her eyes a little. She puts the pillow back and turns again to face him. “Over the years I’d sometime see someone who would catch my interest. But… I wouldn’t let myself get to know them or like them or… anything that might make it harder to leave. It’s… easy not to have little attachments if you’ve got one really big one.”

“I was thinking about every girl I saw or read about.”

“Just girls?” She’s curious about this. Until… she had the bad time, she used to think about both.

He’s curious, too. Girls think about boys, right? “Just girls. Weren’t you thinking about boys?”

“Before… I thought about both. After, if I was thinking about someone, it’d be a girl.”

He spends a moment contemplating that before saying, “Someone safe?”

She nods. “Someone soft and gentle and… There weren’t a lot of people like that, girls or anyone else, at Niima.”

“The kind of place that steals the soft and gentle from you?”

“Yeah. Some of the traders looked nice.”

He snuggles in against her, making his very not female, soft, or gentle body as pliant as it can be. She feels what he’s doing and kisses his collar bone. “Did you ever… get to do anything more than think about the girls there?”

“No. Not until I left Luke. I was twenty-six the first time I kissed someone.” Which is both true and misleading. He was twenty-two when he joined the First Order, almost twenty-three, and he did visit the pleasure specialists within the first month of getting there, because he could _finally_ do it and he was more or less rebelling against any and every rule anyone even remotely like a parental figure had ever offered him. He liked it. _A lot._  He didn't like how Snoke responded to him liking it, so he kept his desires clamped down, hard. Three years later, Kammun, one of his knights, finally convinced him to try letting one of the pleasure specialists touch more than his shaft. He liked that, too. He _really_  didn't like how Snoke reacted to that. That kept his relations with pleasure tightly in check.

“You’re my first kiss," Rey says. 

He smiles at that.

“You like that.”

“Yeah. I probably shouldn’t, but… yes, I do.”

“Was I your first _good_ kiss?”

He smiles, a little chagrined… “Um… the way you mean it, yes, but… Not exactly.”

She raises an eyebrow, and he can feel she’s curious about it.

“It’s hard to train here. At least, at my level. You don’t want anyone to know your weaknesses and flaws, and I’m too big and dangerous for most people. Snoke would…” he doesn’t fill in the details of what Snoke would do, but she feels hot, electric pain shatter through him at the memory, “if I ‘damaged someone valuable,’ and… Anyway, Phasma and I were well-suited for each other. I had no interest in anything she ruled. She had no interest in anything I ruled. We weren’t competing for anything, which helped, a lot. We could fight to fight, not fight angry or jealous. We were the same height, and if she had her armor on, she outweighed me by a kilo or two. She used a quicksilver baton which is a good match for my training blade, and her armor was tough enough to take a good solid hit.

“So, we’d train with each other. She’d knock me down. I’d knock her down. We’d go until one of us couldn’t get back up again.”

“You kissed _Phasma?_ ”

“Only the one time.”

He can feel this _shakes_ her. He could have fucked a whole orchard full of peaches without getting this sort of a reaction from her.

“Phasma? Two meters tall, covered in chrome, killed people at a whim, tortured new recruits, _Phasma_?”

“Let me tell the story.” She’s still beyond skeptical, but he can feel why. All she’s got in her mind is blinding chrome and danger. His voice is gentle as he says, “She was a person, Rey. Just like… All of us. There’s a person… or maybe a monster… but most likely a person, behind every mask here. Your Finn, he was one, too. They all are. And Phasma was a person with her own likes and dislikes and sense of humor and voice and…

“And we weren’t exactly friends, or got on all that well, or shared a meal, or had conversations involving more than fifty words that weren’t about our duties, but… we could fight. And that was worth something.

“And I could feel she was pissed at Hux. That’s one layer of red between them. There’s another one, deeper, surging. They were… fucking each other. She was his second-in-command. I don’t know if it ever went deeper than that. I honestly don’t think he could go deeper, and I’m not sure what she got out of it. But she was pissed at him for something, and I’m game to fuck with Hux if the opportunity arises, because he’s just so… fuckwithable. He was like a great, big, ginger kick me sign. Always so stuffy and perfect and…”

She’s looking very disturbed by this. And also realizing that if M’Gll was everything Luke wanted, Hux was probably everything the First Order wanted, but by the time Kylo got here, he had enough power to do something with it.

“You want the one who wasn’t actually a person, it was him. Just a bright orange ball of scheming hate stuffed into a perfect uniform.”

She’s still looking disturbed, and not sure if he’s complementing her theory or ignoring it.

“Anyway. I’ve got her pinned. And neither of us is in our armor for this one, so I outweigh her by a good twenty kilos. Hands on her shoulders, knees on her thighs, she’s _down._ And Hux is lurking, watching us. I can feel he’s pissed at her, too. Maybe they liked fucking angry. Maybe she liked fucking after training. But… she’s under me, and I know she’s angry at him, and I can feel he’s angry at everything, and I’m looking to stir the pot, so I raise an eyebrow at her, and think hard about what I’m going to do, and she nods. So I leaned down and kissed her, and kissed her good, and then next thing I know I’m on my back and she’s on top, because she flipped us, and that is _fucking_ hard without the Force, and then she’s kissing me, and… Hux is about to explode. I can feel his rage spike, and her lips are warm, and… uh… yeah…” He smiles a little. “That was a good kiss.”

“What did he do?”

“Clench his fists. Fantasize hard about stalking over and kicking me in the ribs until they shattered under his boot, then going after my face. He had a really vivid image of breaking my teeth and crushing my face under his boot, but he knew I could stop him dead if he tried. Eventually she stopped kissing me, got up, smirked at me, gave me a quick salute, sauntered off, and he followed her. She had bite marks on her arms and shoulders the next time we trained, but… I mean… If she didn’t want him biting her, she wouldn’t have gotten bitten. Hux was a killer, not a fighter, so if she had marks on her, it was because she let him put them there.”

Rey swallows hard, not sure how to deal with that. Kylo’s just matter-of-factly explaining the world he used to inhabit and… It mostly makes her want to curl up and hide.

“What did you do?”

He blinks.

“After…”

“Oh… Uh…” He hasn’t thought about that kiss for years, and about after that kiss ever. “Got a shower and supper and meditated and read reports and… just a normal night.”

“So, you didn’t…” She trails a finger down his shaft.

“No. Like I said, it wasn’t that sort of good.” He kisses her, soft and easy. _Good._ “I’m not saying, that in the right circumstance or mood I wouldn’t like it, but as of this point in time, I prefer _not_ fucking angry. Or sad. Or loathsome. Or hating myself and my desires and the person I’m with. Or feeling broken and weak and inadequate because I have desires.” He kisses her again, lips grazing over hers as he says, “I like _this._ I like being able to want… things and feelings and sensations. I like soft and gentle and together and talking and seeing the same body more than once and getting to know all of your bits and you learning mine and…” His hand skims along her skin. “Maybe it’s too much Jedi training, but… I like _physically communing together in mutual accord and affection._ ”

She wraps her leg around his hip, and holds him close with arms and legs. “Me, too.”

 

 

* * *

It is a well-known fact that the fastest, easiest way to take out a modern sky-borne armed force is its kitchens.

At least, it is now.

Once upon a time, there was a General in the First Order, and he was in charge of the system that would eventually bear his name, and create the largest, most order-following force of soldiers the galaxy had ever seen.

That man was Brendol Hux.

He had a son. A bastard he got upon a serving woman who wasn’t exactly interested in having a child with him, but she was significantly less interested in what happened to the women who didn’t go along with his wishes.

And when the child was born, he disposed of her.

And he began to _test_ his theories.

He didn’t use all of them upon the boy. That would be counter-productive. He needed the child pliable, capable of great cruelty, and able to serve any whims his master may have. That he was intelligent, paranoid, good with technology, and utterly devoid of empathy were just cherries on the sundae as far as he was concerned.

The ones he did use proved to be successful, and his son rose high and fast among the First Order, in danger of outranking him by the time he was twenty-seven.

And that would not do.

He was contemplating what to do with that when he ate what appeared to be a lovely bowl of stew, and was dead before morning.

It was then that Colonel Armitage Hux sent a report to the Supreme Leader, showing him how easily his kitchens could be subverted, and with just a few drops of the correct, slow moving, chemical mixture that their entire ship could have been murdered.

Said report also offered the steps necessary for a state of the art upgrade of the kitchen services, along with a suggestion that perhaps a generous promotion for the man who ordered said report would be useful. (And it didn’t outright state, but it certainly suggested that if that promotion wasn’t forthcoming, the antidote to said chemical compound wasn’t going to be finding its way into the food supply, either.)

Thus it is, now, that _almost_ the entire kitchen staff of the _Supremacy_ and any other First Order ship is made of droids. Droids to not use the restroom and forget to wash their hands. Droids do not get lazy and forget to properly sanitize their tools. Droids do not go to work with a cold and sneeze on the food. Droids cannot be bribed into looking the other way while a few drops of a specific and rare chemical compound find their way into a bowl of stew. Droids can cut costs by always making portions the same sizes and minimizing waste by always using the most efficient cuts.  

In fact, the only things droids _can’t_ do is smell or taste or hunger.

And, while Snoke wasn’t going to be getting the Boss of the Year award, he was fully aware that hungry soldiers make stupid mistakes, but well-fed ones had an easier time obeying orders and doing what was needed when it was needed, so he thought making sure the food was _good_ mattered.

That said, there are people who work in the kitchens to make sure that things _taste_ good. There is a Chef of the _Supremacy_ , and his rank is about the equivalent of a general. These days most of his job is logistical, making sure that enough food of the right type at the right time gets to the right places and then fed to the right people. These days he’s making sure that 2.3 million people are fed at least three times a day and snacks are available, too. He hasn’t actually cooked anything in a decade.

He has a herd of sous chefs, and they actually do cook things. Making up recipes and menus from everything they get in, keeping the rotation fresh and varied, making sure the supplies don’t just sit in storage and go bad, and programming the army of droids to make the actual meals.

So, when he gets a request from C8 to keep a standing order for strawberries open for the Supreme Leader, he’s got someone to talk to about it.

They find the request for strawberries amusing. Apparently the Supreme Leader has something of a sweet tooth, and getting them isn’t horribly difficult. They stop near planets that produce them at least once a month, so… Sure.

Sweet cream. That one’s also easy enough.

Chocolate… The Supreme Leader has bizarre eating habits. All he appears to want is… dessert?

Coffee… Every day… That gets them talking like mad. _Every_ day. When he first asked for it, they only had a few ounces of it on board. Getting more took a little while, but… If the Supreme Leader wants coffee, the Supreme Leader gets coffee, and the accounting department can deal with how much it costs.

Finally, a week into this, the Chef gets a request for a large portion of whatever it is he is personally eating for breakfast and dinner.

So, he does that.

After the first breakfast he gets back a note saying _More._

So, he adds more to dinner. The Supreme Leader is a big man after all.

And after dinner, C8 sends him another note, saying _More._

The next breakfast is bigger, yet. And this one gets another note saying, _More._

So for the next dinner the Chef just piles it on. And that one gets a note saying, _Good._

Which is what causes this conversation: “Have you ever seen the Supreme Leader?”

His top Sous Chef, the one who is actually cooking all of this, shakes his head. “Only pictures.”

“He’s got to be huge.”

He shrugs a little.

“I mean… that’s got to be what, forty-five hundred calories a day?”

He nods again. "Plus lunch."

“No one needs that much food. I don’t care what you do, you do not need that much food.”

Another quick shrug. The Sous Chef is not about to add any voice to this conversation. You never know what the droids around you are picking up.

“You think he’s…” He makes a quick gagging himself gesture.

The Sous Chef puts down his spatula and says, voice very low, “My buddy in laundry says he’s got a companion.”

And that’s when the Chef gets it. A huge smile spreads across his face. And the next bowl with strawberries that finds itself in one of the delivery droids also has a collection of edible violets arranged in a very pretty spray nestled among them, fresh mint leaves, a bowl of not just the sweet cream, but also one of melted chocolate.

Kylo certainly didn’t _ask_ for that, but it doesn’t mean he, and Rey, didn’t enjoy it when it showed up.

And that got a note of _Appreciated_ to go with it.  

 

 


	6. Colors

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, all of today's images should be safe for work. (Unless you work in a very conservative sort of place where a man's naked shoulders are an issue, in which case... Well, guess what? Naked Kylo shoulders when you get somewhere not work!)

 

11/1-30/35

          

A life without sun is unsettling to Rey. She appreciates Kylo’s bed, and the fact that his room on the Supremacy is significantly more comfortable than her tent on Lirium. But there’s no _sun._

Sun comes up, day begins, get up and do stuff. That’s how she knows it’s time to move, but on the _Supremacy_ , her body keeps waiting for a signal to get moving that never comes.

Which makes sleeping bizarre. She’ll wake at odd times, well before he does, or occasionally well after. And she supposes that’s her body just letting her know when she’s done being tired, but…

It just feels weird.

 

 

* * *

A life without color feels… flat, to Rey.

It’s a black room with black furniture and black accouterments and black bedding built around a man with black hair and almost black eyes who wears all black. If it weren’t for his pale skin, which, when they’re not playing or sleeping, he keeps almost every inch of covered, he’d blend into the room.

 

His room isn’t dark so much as smothering. It _eats_ light.

“Did you design this, yourself?” she asks one night, as they’re eating.

“No. It was here when I got here.”

She flashes him a curious look.

“This isn’t my first command. I had rooms on _the Finalizer_ , and a space set aside on Starkiller, but moved here when I took full command. Why do you ask?”

“I was trying to figure out if you were smothering any hint of light, or if Snoke did.”

He half smirks. “The whole ship is black or gray with a little red. The outside of the ship is black. You saw his throne room, that red was pretty much the only color he allowed in the place.”

“So, it wasn’t just about you?”

He doesn’t know if that’s true or not. He didn’t care much about a space for himself, beyond a functional lock on the door, and a quiet place to meditate. “I suppose the others have their quarters decorated however they like.”

“Have you never been in anyone else’s quarters?”

“Not on this ship. I was in Hux’s once, on the _Finalizer_. It was… austere and functional. Gray mostly.”

“Sounds like a lot of the First Order.”

Kylo shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe. The more I get into this, the more I see that Snoke didn’t like spending money on things he didn’t have to. Austere may have been more about keeping credits in the bank, or turning them into weapons, than any real aesthetic.”

She half-inclines her head in response, and then takes a bite of their supper. It’s some sort of eel, fried crispy with what she considers a tasty sauce, and a collection of green vegetables. He’s been picking at his.

“Don’t like it?” She knows the flavor is likely fine for him, but the edges of the eel is crispy, and the inside is soft and squishy.

He shakes his head a bit, and begins moving the eel to her side of the plate, and more of the vegetables to his.

He’s chewing, just because he doesn’t like it doesn’t mean he won’t eat it. He won’t order it again, but he always eats his part of whatever shows up on their plate. “Does it bother you?” He glances around at his all black world.

“Not for the amount of time I spend here awake. Not with the window,” because he does have one full wall of his quarters made of transteel, and when it’s clear, like it is now, he’s got what feels like a view of the entire universe. But when he sets it to closed, and turns off his lights, his room is _black_ in a way she didn’t know existed when she still lived on Jakku.

“But you wouldn’t want to live here?” he finishes her thought.

“No. I need a world with some color in it.”

He nods, and continues chewing. She can tell he’s just aware of what she’s saying, not making any plans to do anything about it, but not _not_ making plans, too.

“Do you have a favorite color?” he asks a moment later.

She blinks. That’s a question she’s literally never thought of. “Uh… No. I like them all.”

He nods.

“Do you?”

He raises one eyebrow and glances around. If he had decorated it himself… Well… No, he wouldn’t have bothered. Taking time to do things like decorate isn’t part of who he is. But he does like black.

“Oh.”

He shrugs. “Green. I liked green as a child. My room at my parents’ house was light green and brown, and there were trees, like Kashyyyk, painted on the walls.”

She gives his hand a little squeeze.

 

 

* * *

She does like living in a world of books. She doesn’t always like what she’s reading, but she likes the breadth of it.

When the Force first started shoving them into each other’s conscious, Kylo had mentioned how _busy_ he is with running the First Order. What she didn’t realize is that, these days, for him, busy means _reading._

Most nights, she finishes up her work. Because for her _work_ means physically doing something, like building more drainage ditches, or moving more rocks, or… She goes to the _Supremacy_ , and he’s often done for the day by then.

They’ll have supper, talk about the day, play with each other, and that eats up a few hours, but not all of the evening.

After playing, usually feeling calm, and comfortable, they’ll sprawl out across his bed, and read. He gathers up his pillows, props them into a ramp, lays on his belly, and pulls a data pad to him. Some nights, she sits against his headboard, Orlac’s library in her lap, others, she’ll lay across the bed, head resting in the curve of his low back.

She’s against the headboard, when she feels him looking at her pad, not his.

“Kylo?”

He shakes his head. “The one’s crap.”

She doesn’t have to put words to the question in her mind.

 

 

He looks up at her. “The first, sixth, and nineteenth chapters are likely genuine, but the rest of it was heavily redacted during the Council of First Knowledge in 6753.”

She flashes him a very curious look.

He hits her back with one, no idea what he just said she didn’t understand.

“6753?” she asks.

“Since the founding of the Jedi. All of their history is done on that system.”

“What’s that translate into Imperial Standard?”

He’s got to think about it for a moment. “About 2000 Before the Empire, give or take a bit. Their years aren’t the Imperial Standard 360 days. They work off of a 100 day year, but those days are a lot longer because day and night weren’t the same on Jeddah as they were on Coruscant. I’d need a calculator to get it exact.”

“Okay. So…” She runs that from Imperial to New Republic. “So… 1956ish BBY?”

“I hate that.”

Again she’s curious, but this time she takes a stab at what he meant. “BBY?”

“Yes.” He rolls his eyes. “So fucking pretentious. They won _one_ battle, nineteen years into a twenty-four year war, and picked _that_ as the start of their calendar. It’d be one thing if it was Before Battle of Endor, or After the Concordance, or In the Year of the New Republic or… But, no Battle of Yavin. That’d be like me resettling the calendar, again, based on six years ago because I slapped Hux silly when he was being a twit.”

She’s not entirely sure the scale of those things line up. Hux was, from everything she’s heard, both from Kylo and Finn, a truly horrible person, but… He wasn’t a Death Star.

He’s following her thoughts and says, “A Death Star by itself is useless. Let it drift off into space, and it’ll just sit there, doing nothing. You need a man who’s willing to use one. That was Hux. You could drop him naked on an uninhabited planet, and in a year or two, he’d figure out how to start hurting people. He wasn’t a fighter, but he was good with the tech stuff, and if there was a way to hurt people with the tech, he’d figure out how to do it.”

“Twit doesn’t sound like the word I’d use to describe that.”

“Likely not, but… The time I’m thinking of, he really was being a twit. His valet didn’t shine his boots bright enough, and he was in a snit about it, so I hit him.”

Rey thinks about that, and then says, “What does snit mean?”

“Had the man tortured, but Snoke wouldn’t let him execute him. First Order rules, everyone was allowed _one_ mistake, and that was his one. Hours later, he was still complaining about the subpar job. There was one tiny smudge on the heel of the one boot, and he just kept going _on_ about it. I told him to shut up, and he told me I didn’t get to order him around, so I hit him hard enough he dented the wall where he hit it. And then he shut up.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway,” and Kylo’s back to her book, “Manalevan’s thoughts on the nature of service to the Force were too seditious to be allowed. He and his followers broke off, started their own branch, and then vanished. No one’s sure, or at least willing to tell, what happened to him.”

Sometimes, she forgets that he did this. Studied to be a Jedi, that he obtained the rank of Master. That he spent years reading this sort of thing, and that… That there was a dark-haired boy who spent hours with books, reading and learning. Sometimes she forgets there was a dark haired man, hidden behind a black mask, and he lived in a world where people got tortured for not shining boots properly. And somehow, he found a way to thread himself through both needles.

He’s continuing on, “You’ll see it when you get to chapter two, suddenly, instead of reading like something someone might actually say, it starts to feel like a droid with only partially functional verbal processing attempting to explain something complicated.”

“Oh.”

“Of course, by the time a hundred years had passed, the attitude toward what constituted proper service began to shift, and Manalevan became less of a pariah.” He taps her pad. “They tried to put his work back together, which is why you’ve got this, but it’s so badly chopped up that it’s useless.”

“Was there… a lot of that sort of thing?” She’s asking about torturing valets.

“I’d say yes, but…” He shrugs a little. “Unlike you, I never read about any other religions. Maybe they’re all like that.” He answers about Jedi infighting. And she’s not sure if he’s intentionally ducking her question or staying on his current set of thoughts.

“Maybe.” She looks at her pad and decides to stay with Jedi. It’s likely there’s no answer about living in the First Order that’s going to make her happy. “I’ve been avoiding the history and focusing on the philosophy so… I get stuff like this in a vacuum. Just the ideas, none of the politics.”

He kisses her thigh. “Probably the best way to do it. Everything’s ugly when you look at the politics.”

She realizes that’s his answer not just to Jedi infighting, but also to her question about the First Order. She strokes his hair, and looks at his pad, mostly numbers. “What are you slogging through?”

“Spot checking my supply contracts. We buy supplies for the First Order as a whole, and each command ship also orders supplies for its own needs. I’m checking to see if the numbers are in order.”

Her eyes skitter over the column of numbers. They are, for the most part, similar. “What am I looking at?”

“Cost of bacta per liter.”

He’s already got the number highlighted, so it’s easy to find. “And…”

“That’s the _Arcadia_ ,” he replies.

“And the _Arcadia_ is spending three times more per liter than anyone else.”

“That’s how it looks to me.”

“And you intend to find out why.”

“That’s the plan.”

She thinks about it for a moment. “Is there a why that might not get the quartermaster killed?”

He half inclines his head. “I’d imagine there could be a reason for why this is so expensive for him and only him. And I suppose there could be a reason why he doesn’t just place an order from us for it in order to avoid the cost. I just don’t happen to know what it might be.”

That doesn’t bode well for the Quartermaster. “So… what do you do next?”

“Look at his books, see if he’s just spending too much on Bacta, or if he’s spending like this on everything. Check his location. It’s possible if he’s off in the middle of nowhere that just getting things to him is expensive. Maybe it’s a very small, very safe ship, and they just don’t need much of it. The less of it you buy, the more per liter is.”

Rey finds that comforting. Then she _looks_ at what he’s doing. This doesn’t seem like the job of the Supreme Leader. “Don’t you have people who do this?”

“I have auditors. They do this.”

“Then why are you doing it?”

“Every day I have C8 get me something, somewhere to check. I can’t watch everything, but I can check enough things at random to keep people nervous about not getting away with not doing their jobs.”

“And today it was bacta expenses?”

“Today it was bacta expenses. Tomorrow it may be how many uniforms we go through. Or ship maintenance schedules or… How many rivets we’ve got. It’ll be something. I’ll look at it, poke around, and spend a few hours on it.”

She’s not sure if that’s a good use of his time, but since he doesn’t exactly have a trusted second-in-command, she supposes it’s necessary.    

 

 

* * *

She thinks morning Kylo is her favorite Kylo.

He’s not a very good sleeper in the sense of falling asleep easily, or staying that way. She’ll often wake in the night and find him lying on his side, back to her, using his body to shade her from the light of his data pad, reading, usually with a hand or foot touching her.

He tells her that he’s always been the kind of person who prefers to go to sleep long after the sun, if there were one, sets, and stay asleep well into morning. Kind of moot here on the _Supremacy_ , but she can see that being true about him.

However it works, when the part of her brain that’s aware of the idea of morning tells her it’s time to get up, he’s often asleep.

There’s a softness to him when he sleeps. She assumes that’s likely true for everyone, though, aside from those days when the _Falcon_ was stuffed full of people who all had to sleep, and none of them had enough room for it, she hasn’t really ever seen anyone else sleep.

He likes to snuggle in close, spooning up behind her when they’re falling asleep, but generally, at some point in the night, they’ll roll onto their backs, and end up side to side.

So, by the time she wakes up, assuming it’s at a time when he’s sleeping, he’ll be on his back, spread out, taking up… more room than he seems like he possibly could, and given how big he is, that’s a _lot_ of room.

She wonders if this is part of why he’s a bad sleeper. Once he’s fully out, all of his defenses just melt away. He’ll lay there, totally open, completely relaxed.

The man who woke to the green glow of a lightsaber a bare meter from his face can’t afford to do that. And absolutely nothing she’s learned of life in the First Order has done anything to suggest to her that that lesson wasn’t re-taught over and over and over.

She likes the fact, that on mornings like this one, where she’s woken before him, she’s got a chance to… not erase the past, but… complement it, maybe. Offer him the chance to wake up to something other than heart pounding terror and abject rejection.

She does know that if she moves slowly, and gently, and doesn’t do anything too fast or rough, her soft man will lay there, still sleeping, and she can play with him. She can feel how much he enjoys this, being half in dreams, just enough awake to know it’s real, just enough asleep to be utterly careless, to have no existence beyond the sensations she can rise in his body.

She thinks he knows how much she enjoys this, space, where she can just _explore_ him. Where she can fit his physical body, and all of its curves and plains, it’s puckered scars, tiny moles, fine dark hairs, into a psyche that found this form at least unsettling, if not outright dangerous, for almost a decade.

Kylo is _male._ There’s nothing even vaguely androgynous about him. And it’s true that he doesn’t set her danger sense off any longer, it’s also true that that danger sense is still there, and she doesn’t exactly enjoy having it. She doesn’t want that little part of her brain that still clenches a bit when something big and male gets too close.

And she hopes that mornings like this, where he gets to wake up to someone who’s touching him with joy help with his past, that getting to play with him, touch him, explore and taste and look, will help her with hers.

They’ve both got too many nightmares, and maybe waking with sweet dreams will help with that.

He keeps his rooms on the _Supremacy_ comfortably warm. A touch cooler than she’d like, but that’s because her idea of comfortable was set on a desert. So, while it’s true that she appreciates the blankets on his bed for a little warmth, she knows that he has them there more as a matter of defense. So he’s not completely open when he sleeps.

But that’s not part of the game right now, and she slowly, and gently, pulls the blankets up, just a hair at a time, so there’s no fast rush of cool air, and then, when they’re hovering above them, she places them down on the floor.

And in the dark of his star-lit black room, in a time that is likely something like morning, she lays out next to him, resting her hand on his belly, ready to explore.

 

 

* * *

She knows he finds it somewhere between unsettling and inconceivable when she tells him he’s beautiful.

And she supposes that maybe, in the grand scale of things, he’s not. She doesn’t really know; beauty not being a thing she’s spent any great deal of time contemplating. At Orlac’s school, though, they talked a lot about beauty and what it was, and from what she could tell it ranged from extremely symmetrical people with perfectly even features, which, of course Kylo not only doesn’t have but likely never did, to very abstract concepts of color and line and textures bleeding across canvas or clay.

From whatever she could tell, just about anything could be beautiful. Pretty had a stricter definition, and Kylo certainly isn’t pretty. Handsome likely had a similarly strict definition, and he’s probably not handsome.

But he is beautiful.

 

 

* * *

He has fewer scars than she would have thought.

There are the three she put on him, though she didn’t remember getting him in the leg until she saw the mark. That, like much of that fight, bled into a long blur of mostly feelings, and few images. The only really clear image she has of that fight is his eyes, centimeters away from hers, and their sabers reflecting in them.

The line along his side, a thin pink line now, she knows that’s from Chewie’s shot.

There’s the kiss of a lightsaber against his right shoulder, where Finn hit him. It’s only a few days older than the mark the Praetorian Guard put on her. Both of them are about the same size, and shape. But on her body it’s a white mark fading into nothing, and on his it’s still a dark pink.

There are older marks she doesn’t know the stories behind. Several of them faded to white. But not nearly as many of them as she would expect.

She knows he thinks he’s terrible at healing skills, and maybe he is. Or maybe he’s just bad at it the way Luke taught it. Couldn’t do it because it took a lot of light work. Maybe. But if he’s not good at healing, he’s good at something… Preservation or hardness or… something.

She’s seen him after his training fights, feels the amount of force he can put into a strike, and there’s no way, just as a normal human, that he could do that without crushing his hands, breaking his wrists, and shattering his arm.

Human bodies just _can’t_ take that sort of hit.

But his can. And has… His hands are fine right now. Long, thick fingers, resting and relaxed against the sheets, skin pale and unbruised.

And sometimes hasn’t. She knows his nose, and jaw, and both legs, and ribs, and… There are a lot of healed breaks along his body. He can dish out that sort of hit, but not, from what she can see, just take one. Or maybe he can, and whatever hit him was so much harder than what she’s trying not to imagine, that it still broke him.

She closes her eyes, feeling rather than looking, and she can see why this works the way Luke talked about it. If she just lets herself feel it, she can sense little currents of energy flowing around and through him, and there are snarls, tight spots, places where the energy gets dark and sluggish, spots where he doesn’t glow.

She knows some of them are physical. There’s an almost rock hard snarl on the bridge of his nose, an old break that didn’t heal quite right, and the energy petrified into stasis there. There are tangles and sluggish whorls in his head and heart, too. Part of her wants to lay her hands on him, and unpick those threads, untangle them, get them flowing the way they were meant to, but…

He wouldn’t be Kylo after.

If that energy is going to shift, and if he’s still going to be him after, he’s got to do it himself, or at least ask her for help. It can’t be something she just _does_ to him.

 

 

* * *

She supposes it’s big.

The men at Niima used to joke or brag about how big they were, but she didn’t care to ever find out. The ladies would occasionally talk. They seemed less interested in how big the men were, beyond telling them that they weren’t nearly so big as they thought they were. But, wherever they were on the big scale, it certainly seemed to matter to them.

Kylo as a whole is big, so… It’s probably big.

Sleeping on his thigh, cuddled up in its little cap, it doesn’t seem big so much as _right._ And, if it’s cuddled up against his leg, instead of standing tall, that means he didn’t sleep through the night. When he sleeps straight through, it’ll rise up to greet the day. Mornings like that, he’ll often wake first, and she’ll wake with him wrapped around her, gently rubbing against her rear.

A lot of them have been good mornings. One of these days she’ll ask why it can predict how well he slept, but for right now, she’s content to just know that it does.

She enjoys this part of the morning, and his parts, how she can just, lightly, stroke the little cap, or gently lick it, just a slight graze of wet tongue on soft, soft skin. And it is so soft. Nothing about Kylo, especially awake Kylo, looks like it should be soft, besides his hair, but this little tip is so soft. She likes the feel of it under her fingers or against her tongue.

She likes the smell of it, and the taste, especially now, in the morning. Later, at night, if they haven’t gotten a bath, and he’s been doing something physical and hard, it can get a bit overpowering, and not in a good way. After the bath, he just smells like soap, and it’s nice soap, but it’s not _him_. But now, when all they’ve done is play and rest… This is good.

She likes the way, especially when she’s being very gentle with him, like she is now, that it’ll start to wake up slow and easy. The head fills out first, then the bottom of the shaft, and eventually the middle catches up, and it’ll creep its way from his thigh to his belly. Eventually, it’ll stand up, looking to meet her lips and fingers, asking for more.

By that point, the little cap’s grown tight around him, and just a hint of pink peeks out.

It’s a shaft, so it can’t exactly have a personality, but it does. It likes to tease, barely peeking out at her, calling her closer, to come and get to know what’s hiding below.

If she’s gentle, and careful, and keeps her tongue and fingers wet, it’ll stay that way, just peeking at her. He’ll shiver, a little, even in his sleep, and make a tiny _mmm_ sound when her tongue glides over the pink.

If she’s rougher, holding it in her hand, stroking firmly, the cap will slide back, and all of his pink will be exposed, flushed to the air, to her gaze, damp and waiting. He doesn’t make any noise at that, but the muscles in his stomach and thighs tense, eager.

He’s not really asleep now, but he’s not exactly awake either. Probably in that sleepy space where everything is soft and loose and easy, aware of the world around him, but not caring much about it, maybe still dreaming a little, adding a layer of fantasy images to the world around him.

She slips her tongue over him, her mouth around him, sucking gently, her pink on his. His eyes are moving fast behind his lids, but he doesn’t open them, doesn’t move his hands to touch her, or guide her.

She’s playing, and he’s surrendering, enjoying, passively accepting pleasure.   

She can feel his tension building, though he’s not really moving. His hips and thighs are still fairly loose, but not for much longer. The muscles of his low belly are starting to clench up. His hips start a slow, easy rock.

A few more strokes, and he’ll spurt.

She’s moving a little faster, still keeping things gentle, not wanting to jar him too quickly into full awake, and the thought that occurs to her is that she’s never _seen_ him spurt.

Felt it, likely on a more intimate and intense level than anyone who isn’t Force sensitive can. And felt it on the more common level of it happens inside of her, so she’s _felt_ it. But never _seen._

His thighs twitch, a little. If he were more awake, she knows he’d be thrusting, hard, but his body’s not up to much right now. So, just a little twitch, and tiny roll, and she pulls back, crouching between his legs, just stroking with her hand, and watches.

It’s so flushed. Pink and red toward the tip, and wet, shining, and so hard. The veins are standing out, purple-blue against pink skin, and the cap’s nowhere to be seen, having pulled back as he grew longer, seeking release.

His face is starting to look tense, chest tight, nipples hard, fingers starting to draw into fists, and he’s breathing faster, so close. She rubs just a little faster, feeling it slip through her fingers, slick and hot, and then he twitches all over, twitches in her hand, too, and it puts her in mind of a break in a hydraulic lift. One fast spurt, fluid shooting out, arcing high to hit his belly and chest, and then a few smaller ones, dripping over his belly and her hand, as the pressure lets off.

His skin is pink, flushed all over, not just his shaft, and his breathing is slowing down. She calls a towel to hand and gently wipes both of them off, before laying on her side, next to him, watching.

 

 

* * *

She knows he’s awake, fully awake, has been since about a second before he spurted, but he hasn’t opened his eyes, yet, he rolls over to face her, and then he does. Slowly. And they stay at only two-thirds open. Sleepy eyes. He gazes at her, and there’s no other word for it, this is a gaze, it’s not a look or an ogle or anything else, it’s a gaze.

He doesn’t smile, but she can feel he’s warm and content, and that sensation is new and frightening for him.

He doesn’t reach for her, not touching, but his eyes are intense, and she can feel his emotions open to her. “I feel you here. Even with my eyes closed. I know I’m not dreaming. But I always take a breath before I open them, just to stretch that moment out a little longer, because it’d be so horribly disappointing if you weren’t here when I opened them.”

She takes his hand in her, kisses it, and smiles at him.

He half-smiles back, and she can feel the litany in his head: _Don’t ever leave me. Don’t let me wake alone. Don’t reject me. Don’t decide I’m not enough. Don’t break me._ She can feel the moment he woke in Snoke’s throne room, alone, save for the person he least wanted to see at that moment, Hux.

But he doesn’t say it. So she doesn’t respond to it.  

Both of them know, that some things, even if they can feel them, still belong in privacy of their own heads.

 

 

* * *

Rey likes sunlit Kylo.

When he does come to her, he’s usually just in time to catch the sunset. At least the second of them. The green sun lingers longer in the sky, waiting an hour or so to join its sibling, and as it does so, it casts everything in an orange-brown glow.

He’s got that jittery edge to him that goes with too many details and not enough running around or hitting things.

Lucky for him, Chewie left today, and left Rey with four new pre-fab cottages. All the comforts of home, albeit a small one. Each one is a main room and a tiny bath area. They clock in a 150 square meters, and rumor has it, can be put together by one person with three tools, a modicum of technical talent, and a spare afternoon.

Or so the instructions say.

She didn’t outright ask Chewie if he got these from the same guy who sold him the transteel dome, but she’s got the sinking suspicion, in that she’s got all three of the necessary tools, significantly more than a modicum of technical talent, and has been attempting to get the first two walls locked into place for three hours, (with both said technical talent _and_ her Force skills) that just possibly, these things are not quite as spiffy as advertised.

They are, however, _cheap_ and these days, when she’s living more or less off of Chewie’s kindness and whatever scraps the Resistance can kick to her, that counts for _a lot._

So, right now, she’s got work, heavy, demanding, move big things around, work. (Part of why this is possibly taking her more than three hours is that she’s just not tall enough to get some of the higher bits fitted together. Or maybe they just _can’t_ fit together. Either way…)

It’s warm today. Warm in the way Jakku just never got. It got hot there, but there was no moisture in the air, so it didn’t feel so thick and slow. And, yes, Chewie said it was winter on the coast, but it can’t be winter here. The grasses are alive and happy, waving about in what little breeze there is, sagey-green-gray. There are tiny flowers that grow on and through them. This has to be summer, or maybe late spring. Winter can’t be the season where everything is _alive._

But, whatever season it may be on the equator of Lirium, a kilometer from a transteel dome, a few hundred meters from the edge of a lake, it’s _hot._ Fortunately, Chewie’s never been fussed by naked or mostly naked humans, so she didn’t feel odd about stripping down to just her shorts and undershirt as they unloaded the buildings. 

Hours later, after Chewie’s left, Kylo arrives and intensely notices her in just her undershirt and shorts. She feels a little self-conscious when he looks her over, and smiles, licking his lips. She rolls her eyes at that, she’s sweat soaked, hair ratty, and covered in smears from the oil that’s supposed to let the wall pieces just slide into each other.

He pulls off his tunic and shirt, and stands beside her. “What are we building?”

“Hopefully, a cottage.”

“Yours?”

“Maybe. For a little while, at least. If I can get this together, I might take two of the other ones,” she nods to the boxes of cottages that Chewie left behind, “and make a bigger one for me.”

His eyes flick to the packaging, and he can see the specs on this indicate it’s about half the size of his bedroom. “Don’t want to be constantly tripping over me?”

She gives him a little shove with her hip. “It’d be nice if it were big enough for both of us. And… I kind of like the idea of having a separate place to sleep from where I eat and work.”

“I certainly do.”

They get an hour to work, before the light is too scarce to see what they’re doing. And though the cottage refuses to come together without some serious re-tooling of the joints, she’s not too dismayed.

She spent an hour, in the sunshine, with her Kylo. The _Supremacy_ doesn’t just eat light, it eats color. The Supreme Leader has almost white skin. He has black hair, and black eyes, and wears all black. The First Order bleached all of the color out of him, and dyed the bits that may have had some life in them black.

 

 

Sunset Kylo, on a grassy plain, in the orangey-brown sunset light, has _brown_ eyes. They’re dark, and always will be, but they’re _brown._ Warm brown, a color that makes her think of slow moving, succulent liquids. Something she hasn’t yet tasted, but is looking forward to. His skin is pale. Between keeping every inch of him below his chin covered all day, every day, and the artificial light of the Supremacy, he is _pale._ But in the sunset, he’s pale peach. His hair is black. That’s true of him no matter where he is, but like the rest of the planet, it gets a layer of slightly brownish sunset highlights here. His lips and nipples are still pink, but unlike on the Supremacy, where they contrast sharply against the pale of his skin, here they’re just a warmer, redder compliment to his skin.

For an hour, she got to see him bright, in color, not black, or gray, and work with him on building something, together.

 

* * *

She notices, and thinks about, after, in the shower with him, as they scrub off the smears of oil, and humid sweat of too hard work on a too hot day, that he really _enjoyed_ that.

He’ll often do something hard and physical just to do it. Move rocks, run around the lake until he collapses, beat his punching bags into tatters, train with his saber until his arms shake. Something, anything physically difficult, and though his body sings from the endorphins, she doesn’t get the sense that he really _likes_ it.

It’s a means to an end.

But… He was smiling as they kept trying to get the bits together, laughing a little, though they were both frustrated. At one point, rather than putting the walls down so they could get to the top easily, he picked her up, settled her on his shoulders, so she could see where the joint wasn’t meshing properly.

It was fun.

 

 

 

Her, and her boy, building something, in the sunshine. Almost, achingly close to the shape she saw of… at the time she thought it was Ben’s future, but now knows it’s Kylo’s, when their hands touched for the first time.

“You really liked that,” she says to him as he’s rubbing shampoo into her hair.

He doesn’t exactly respond, but she can feel the agreement.

She turns around, facing him, water streaming down her back, suds flowing over her. She lays her hands on his chest, just below the token that he’s wearing today, and she can _feel_ it all through her. “It’s not enough to kill the past, you’ve got to replace it with a present, and a hope for a future.”

His fingers trace over hers, and she can tell he’s not quite sure where she’s going to take this. If it’s a condemnation or a commendation.

“You tear things down, but you’re doing it so you can build anew. You’re not destruction for the sake of destruction, you’re destruction for the sake of creation.” She feels the flash of that, how he took out the Jedi, destroyed their place, and how he destroyed Snoke’s idea of the First Order. How he’s cleared and is clearing the ground for something _new._

That pleases him. He doesn’t smile, but she can feel how much he likes that.  

She can feel him take that flash, that re-framing of the past, and run with it. “No Jedi, no Sith, no New Republic, no First Order… Tear them all down and start new.” She feels it turn in his head, too. “But I still don’t know what new is.”

She strokes his shoulders and arms, and touches the token. “We’ll find it.”

 


	7. Toy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No pictures this week, so read wherever you are!

 

11/14/35 ABY

 

Kylo’s very happy to see the first of his training droids show up. It’s bright, shiny black, articulated like a human, walks a lot like one, and the man from the company who makes them puts it through what looks like an impressive demonstration.

At least, against him it looks good.

But Kylo knows he’s a better fighter than the man. Everything they’re doing is basic combat.

The man is panting a little, tired, pleased. “Does it meet your needs, My Lord?”

Kylo shucks off his cloak, and strips out of his tunic, too. It had done well against the man from the company, so he strips off his shirt, too, hopeful this will at least result in a decent workout if not a good fight.

“We’ll see. Hardened selenium-steel plate armor?”

The man nods. “Like you requested.”

That means he should be able to hit it a few times with his saber without destroying it. He has a training saber, a light, flexible baton that allows him to hit, but not destroy, but he prefers to work with his lightsaber. The flame can hurt him just as easily as someone else, and training with something else might dull his own edge.

He extends his saber, and moves into his usual defensive half-crouch.

The Droid has one of their execution axes. A more than formidable weapon, and its electro-blade can deflect a lightsaber hit. It extends it, blade glowing, and gives it a few testing swishes.

Kylo watches the actions. Basic, starting up, day one of armed hand-to-hand martial combat training moves.

“Do you want any protective gear?” the sales rep says.

Kylo shakes his head. He’s still wearing his gloves, and they’re flame retardant, and have a thin layer of plexiplast, enough to give him an extra second or two of protection against his blade, or the droid’s. They’re enough. If this thing manages to lay a hit on him, he’ll be shocked.

“You have to tell it to attack.”

“What if I want to be surprised?”

“E4, attack at will.”

E4 waits for a few more breaths, and then springs. It’s fast. Kylo will give it that, but it’s planning an attack based on the idea that he’s a new recruit with a standard list of potential counter attacks. Kylo dodges out of the way, bends back, spins, lunges, whips his saber into play, three fast, hard hits while he sweeps down, leg extending, kicking it’s knee joint, hard, stabbing up with his saber again, and then springing up, elbowing it right where it’s chin would be.

By the time he’s stopped moving, there’s a pile of expensive hardware, with sparks streaming out of its midsection, crumpled on the ground, two of its limbs no longer attached, and the axe is buried in the wall behind them.

The manufacturer winces. “I’ll be back with a better one.”

Kylo stares at him long and steady, until he feels the fear rising in the manufacturer. “Do so.”

Kylo looks at his elbow; it’s bright red, and he’s got the feeling he may have bruised himself by hitting the hard surface of the droid’s face.

“If you could make the outside more human, that’d be good, too.”

“It’s doable. Uh…” The manufacture swallows… “The… pleasure droids… are extremely… lifelike… on that level.”

“Teach one of them to really fight, and bring it to me.”

He can feel the manufacture wondering if Kylo wants it to have _all_ of its functions in addition to combat, but he decides not to ask. Instead he says, “What would you like it to look like?”

“I couldn’t care less.” His look makes it clear he intends to kill the thing, not fuck it, and the manufacturer’s knees buckle with fear at that misstep. “I won’t be able to tailor whomever attacks me to suit my preferences, so I don’t expect that to be true of the training droids. Get one that works, if it’s satisfactory, make a selection of them in a variety of shapes and sizes. At least some of them should be bigger and stronger than I am, but beyond that, I don’t care.” He pulls his shirt back on. Didn’t even break a sweat. Disappointing. 

“On it, my Lord.”

“Good.”

 

 

* * *

“Would you like company, my Lord?”

Kylo eyes the commander in front of him. TF-478. Major TF-478. He’s been part of the Officer corps for fifteen years and is, Kylo guesses, five years younger than he is. A Hux method graduate, but because of his IQ and facility with quantum problem solving, he was shunted to the ‘officer’ path early on.

They’d been talking about his navigator training program. Namely, they need more of them. Especially as he moves away from larger craft to smaller ones, he needs a navi team for each one and… And that takes time, and training, and effort, and even the best computer needs an equally good person at its helm to figure out where it needs to go.

Kylo’s given him the go ahead to increase the training program by a factor of three, or basically, everyone in their collection of sub-adults, new recruits, and officer corps who have the IQ and quantum processing test scores to do it, and everyone else he can beg, borrow, or bribe out of every other transit corporation or sky navy.

And he’d been hoping to go beat his punching bag and a few other of his training tools into a pulp because now he’s got to figure out how to pay for the equipment, teachers, and replacements for the people he’s shifting into those positions.

Right now a chance to really _pound_ something or better yet, _someone_ would help, a lot.

And when TF offers, for a second Kylo _thrills_ at it.

And for a second, he goes cold, wondering what TF’s motivation is, but… he’s not feeling any malice here. There’s no alternative plans, no getting to know how he fights so he can use it later to his advantage. Actually… There’s almost a sense of a kindred spirit. Kylo’s got to shift funds around to cover this. TF’s got to find the equipment, teachers, and recruits to train, none of which are readily available.

Just because they’ve come to an agreement that something has to happen, doesn’t mean that getting that thing will be easy.

“I’m rated on every standard weapon the First Order uses, sir, and it’s been a few days since I’ve had a good fight.”

Kylo blinks. TF’s not very big. He’s… nose high on Kylo, slender, likely wiry under his uniform. Kylo’s going to flatten him in three hits. And if he’s not speed of light fast, those three hits will happen less than a minute into the fight.

“And I’ve always… kind of… wondered… how a lightsaber works.” There’s actually some excitement there.

Kylo’s not sure if he should welcome that or not. He finally says, “You’re not wearing armor.”

“Would I need to be?”

“I don’t play fight, Major, even when I’m training. If you aren’t blindingly fast and wearing armor, you’re going to lose limbs if you train against me while I’m using my saber.”

“Hand to hand?” He’s looking up at Kylo, excited he’s managed to get this far into the conversation. TF was sure he’d be turned down flat long before now.

“Do you enjoy pain?”

“I enjoy a good fight, and you look like you’d be one.”

Kylo thinks about it, feeling an itch to get to really, truly _hit_ someone, and then nods. “I am.” He looks back at TF. “But not for you. You’re too valuable to risk damaging.” He thinks about it for a moment longer. “I should have some decent training droids eventually. When they finally get them right, you’re welcome to work on one of them near me.”

TF smiles. “I’ll enjoy that.”

 

 

 

* * *

A week later, the Manufacturer is back, with a second droid.

It may be an improvement. At least, it’s certainly closer to what Kylo asked for. It looks like a person. Somewhat.

It’s about the same size as Kylo, maybe a little bigger, intentionally gender neutral, with light brown skin, and light brown hair, and light brown eyes. Actually, aside from the coloring and lack of breasts, it puts him in mind of Phasma.

Except, it doesn’t.

Phasma was, no matter what, _alive._ Even if, coated in armor as she was, you couldn’t tell just by glancing at her.

And this thing… Kylo’s got no idea how desperate you’d need to be to have sex with one of them. The body is perfectly human-shaped, he assumes the skin probably feels perfect, though he’s reticent to touch it, because its eyes are dead, it’s room temperature, and there’s just no _life_ there.

Though, he supposes that if you couldn’t feel the life in something just by _feeling_ maybe they wouldn’t be so off-putting.

As it is, he’s finding looking directly at it disconcerting. He’d almost rather go back to fighting the armored droids and just deal with the bruises.

But he’s not about to allow that to show up on his face.

“More to your liking? These have been modified so that the outer flesh is as close to human as possible, and we’ve set the bone strength at human level, too. You’ll be able to hit this the same way you would a person, with similar results.”

Kylo puts his lightsaber down. This thing’s not wearing armor, and if he hits it with his saber, that’ll be the end of that.

He reaches for his training blade, calling it to his hand. The Manufacture goggles to see it fly through the room. It’s the same weight, and a similar balance to his lightsaber. It can’t be exactly right, after all, it has to have a blade so he can make sure he hits, while the blade of his light saber is _light_ so it doesn’t weigh anything. Likewise, there are heated spikes on the side of this, sharp and hot enough to keep him aware of them, but not nearly as dangerous as the heat vents on his own blade.

“Same commands as before?” he asks.

“Just tell it to attack at will, and it’ll come at you when it sees an opening.”

Kylo crouches into his defensive stance, blade out, waiting. “E4 attack at will.”

This one is armed with a baton as well. Just a training fight.

Kylo keeps waiting, and for a long minute E4 appears to be watching him, judging what to do next, and then it springs. It’s still _very_ fast, and its attack plans appear to be getting somewhat better. But it’s focused on the training blade, and in three quick moves Kylo’s got its baton from it, and has whacked it with his elbow hard enough to have snapped its neck.

“Somewhat stronger skeletal system on the next one,” Kylo suggests.

“And a more rigorous fight algorithm.”

Kylo nods, looking at the electronic corpse on the floor. Then he says, voice low. “Make sure the next one is right.”

The Manufacture blanches. And nods. And stammers, “Yes, sir.”

 

* * *

“Who’s next, C8?” Kylo asks, toweling off, fast, before pulling his shirt back on. He’s found that if he has an especially frustrating meeting, which his last one was, that taking five or ten minutes to go to his gym and just whale on something makes for much more productive meetings for the rest of the day.

He’s really hoping the next iteration of the training droids are up to his expectations, because at this point he’s killed his punching bag more times than he can count. He’s wary of fighting with anyone else on his staff, they’re either too useful to him to risk hurting them, or too dangerous to him to risk letting them get a good idea of how to plan an effective attack against him.

There are several reasons why he never trained with Hux. But that was the biggest of them. He never, ever wanted Hux to know any of his weaknesses. He’s sure that if Hux ever found one, the blade he wore on his arm would be through it before Kylo could stop him.

It occurs to him, that he’s hated, deeply and often, but Hux is likely the only man, only non-Force wielder he ever feared.

That’s the thing about rabid curs, only an insane man rests easy with one at his back.

The man entering his training room is about as not Hux as it’s possible to be, though they both have a similar build and coloring. Tall, slender, pale skin, though Frakes is blonde, but Hux, even Hux standing still, looked dangerous. Assuming he slept, Hux probably looked dangerous when he was asleep, though he never thought to ask Phasma if that was actually true.

Nothing about Major Frakes inspires fear or hate or for that matter, even an inkling of a dangerous mind. He wears his command grays easily, like they were made for him, but for all Kylo knows, they were. It’s possible that Frakes is part of the team who designed this uniform, made sure it looks the way it does.

And given how well it looks on him, Kylo’s thinking that’s likely. He pulls his tunic over his shirt, and begins to fasten the hooks and eyes. “Major.”

“My Lord.” He has a box in his hand, and a sketch pad on top of it. “If this is a bad time, we can reschedule.”

“No. It’s good. What do you have for me?”

Frakes puts the box down, moves the pad to the side, and opens it carefully. Kylo’s breath hitches a little as he lifts the first piece out and offers it to him.

Kylo takes it in hands that aren’t shaking, but feel like they might, if this were a different audience. It’s his mask. Perfect. Down to the damage on the face plates. It’s exactly the way it was before he shattered it. It feels the same in his hands and the tiny motion of his thumb to unlatch it makes for a familiar hiss.

Frakes is watching him, eyes bright, waiting to see what he does with it.

Kylo looks at it, strokes his hand over it, and then gently places it down. He’s not trying it on with an audience. That’s a moment for him, and his ghosts, alone.

“Thank you, it looks perfect.”

Apparently, Frakes can read his gesture well enough to not ask him to try it on and make sure it’s right. He pulls out a piece of black fabric, that, as he unfolds it, Kylo recognizes as a shirt. With his mark of office on it.

He takes that, too, fingers on the badge.

“The mark of the Supreme Leader,” Frakes says.

Kylo stares at it, and he feels another moment of how he’s about to change things, how he’s going to shift his world. “No, Major, no more Supreme Leaders.” His fingers graze over the badge. “This is the mark of a Master.” He can see, and feel, that Frakes is a little confused at that, but he doesn’t much care.

He’s not Snoke, and he doesn’t need to be Snoke, and… And he’s killing the past, not retooling it to make it fit him.

Though he supposes calling himself the _Master of the Order_ , and suddenly he just _knows_ that’s what he is, is retooling the past. After all, there was a full year in which he was Master Ben, and then one more as Master Kylo, but it’s an older past, it’s a past that was supposed to wear tan and brown robes and wield a blue lightsaber, and serve at the will of a Republic.

He’s undoing his tunic, letting it drop to the floor, pulling his shirt off, ready to try this on, to feel the shift that goes with it. And it’s _good._ It goes on smooth, readily slipping onto his skin, onto his _self._

Master Ben Solo was supposed to serve.

Kylo Ren, Master of the Order, rules.

Master Solo took orders and shaped the universe to fit those orders. He was a tool of the will of… He doesn’t know. His mother and her cadre of politicians.

Master Ren will offer his people a voice, he’ll hear their call, and secure them the future they want.

Master Solo had no ego, no will, no skin in the game. He was a means to an end.

Master Ren will shape the game, make the rules, and then allow anyone who wishes to join him to play.

One whole wall of the gym is mirrors. Ostensibly to make sure that one keeps their form properly aligned, though Kylo usually ignores it. It’s been decades since he was at the stage when he still needed to look to see if his form was off. But he’s not ignoring them right now. He’s looking at himself, new mark on his sleeve, nodding slowly.

“This is excellent, Major Frakes.”

Frakes is beaming, genuinely pleased at this, excited, too. He nods to his pad. “Come, look. I’ve got ideas for your rally set.”

Kylo joins him, sitting next to him on the benches against the training room wall. “Usually, in this sort of thing, the man talking shares the stage with other important people, but… We’re not doing that. This is about _you,_ and your place in the galaxy, and you’re not sharing it with anyone. We’re putting you on a raised stage, because I want everyone to be able to see you, though there’d be a certain poetry to just having you at floor level, and letting you just loom over everyone with your natural height… But, too many people for that. I want the back row to see you just as easily as the front.”

The sketch Kylo is looking at is him, at a podium, on a stage, huge banners with his symbol hanging down behind him, and on the podium, around him, stretching through the entire flight deck of the Supremacy is every man who can be spared from work. He knows their current complement is close to 850,000 men, and if he had to guess, Frakes intends to have half a million of them on the deck for this.

He flips to the next sketch. “Instead of putting the other high and mighty up with you, they’re going down here.” He’s got a place for ‘honored guests’ but it’s clear that they are not, literally, not, on his level. They’re at least two meters below his feet. “We’ll make them feel important by putting them up close, and assigning someone to make them feel taken care of, give them nice staterooms when they’re here, but we’re going to make it clear that they aren’t your equal.”

Kylo nods at that, liking it, and then another idea hits. “How many seats is this?”

“Two thousand, do you want more, sir?”

“Yes, make it five thousands. I want my five thousand longest serving members here. I want the silver marks of citizenship already on their arms.”

Frakes grins, understanding that. “I like that.” He takes his stylus, and then makes a box around the seats behind the front ranks. “High and mighty back here.”

“Certainly.”

“Two thousand of them?”

“Uh…” He doesn’t know if he even knows of two thousand high and mighties to invite to something like this. After Hux destroyed the Hosnian system, the galaxy has been a bit low on high and mighties, and lower yet on ones likely to trust an invitation from him. “I’ll have C8 give you a final count.”

“That will be fine.”

“What’s the timeframe on this?” Kylo asks.

“Ten weeks. We’re still scouring the galaxy for silver thread. You’d think it’d be easy to find, but we’re burning through thousands of kilometers of it getting things ready, but by the time we’re done, every mark will have been re-done. Caps, jackets, coats. We’ve got the stencils cut, and are waiting for a few days to do a massive, get all the ships changed over at once push.

“Set the date for this, not less than ten weeks from now, and I’ll make sure the entire First Order is rebranded in time for you to set foot on that stage.”

“Good. I’m also going to need pamphlets.”

That throws Frakes for a loop. “Uh… sir?”

“We were slaves to the First Order, but we’re going to be citizens of The Order, and I have a feeling I’m going to need to spell out what that means.”

“I imagine that would help.” It’s clear on his face that Frakes has never conceptualized the idea that they were slaves to the First Order, but thinking about it, and how they get their youngest members, he’s starting to think of it that way, and he’s _not_ comfortable with that thought. “But… I’m not the one who does pamphlets. You have a publishing department and they’re the ones who handle all of the regs, keeping track of them, making sure everyone can find them, stuff like that.”

Kylo nods, making a mental note to ask C8 to set up that meeting, and then says to Frakes, “Major, your own mark, will it have a silver band?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve been with the F—Order, for ten years.”

“Good.” He taps the sketch. Front row, far right of the section right in front of the stage. “That one is yours.”

 

       

* * *

He shows Rey the shirt later that night.  “Kylo Ren, Master of the Order.”

She touches the mark on his shirt, and nods slowly, liking yet another sign of him killing The First Order.

He’s pacing around, ideas flowing fast and free. “We were slaves. Many literally stolen from their homes. Executed for disobeying orders or making mistakes. A successful graduate of the Hux method had his will literally beaten out of him. No more. We’re going to be volunteers, and citizens, and we’re going to make something _great._

“My mother and her politicians and rebels, what did they want? A republic, that’s what they kept asking for. But who got to vote, and who got represented? Politicians and planets. Fuck that! People. Any person, any species, anywhere. Put your five years in, and get your voice.” He touches the wall behind him. “This was the best idea Snoke ever had.”

Her eyebrows scrunch together.

“ _The Supremacy_. He never bound himself to a planet. He didn’t care about ground. It was pretty much useless to him. I’m keeping that. We’re not going to send Stormtroopers all over the galaxy to conquer planets. We’re going to collect citizens from everywhere, and who cares where they are? Anywhere, anyone, they’ll have a voice with me.”

“And if they decide they want to speak to their local planet, maybe you’ll help them find their voice,” Rey adds.

Kylo smiles at that. “If enough of them want to, if they vote for it, _yes._ They’re going to come to me, Rey, I’m not going to take them, they’re going to give themselves to me, because I’ll give them something they can’t get otherwise!”

 

 

* * *

It’s two more weeks before the manufacturer is back. And by this point Kylo’s _itching_ to fight something. He’s almost ready to take T8 on that offer, risk to his best navigator be damned.

This time the Manufacturer has three different droids with him. They’re all still more or less human looking but…

“We diversified. Part of the problem was we were trying to give you a droid that could do everything. And it could, just not to the level you needed. So, instead of that… E4 is a bladed combat specialist. E6 is for hand to hand. And E9 is for when you’re feeling up to a challenge.”

Kylo nods. It’s been _much_ too long since he’s had a real fight. “E9 it is.”

E9 is another head taller than he is, and likely has thirty kilos on him. He’s wearing armor, and has a club and some sort of electro-bladed weapon, but he doesn’t know what sort yet.

“Metal skeleton?”

“Hybrid, three times as strong as human bone. You won’t hurt yourself too bad, but you won’t be able to break him too easily.”

“Good.”

Kylo strips out of his tunic and shirt again, keeping on his gloves. He ignites his saber.

“Attack at will E9.”

And before he’s even in his defensive crouch, E9 is on him. He’s honestly not sure what happened, other than it hurt significantly more than he was expecting, and it’s a good thing E9 never pulled his blade.

He calls time when he’s aching from head to toe, dripping with sweat, and already half covered in dark purple-black bruises from where the club’s crashed into his body.

He’s panting, dizzy from a few hits to his head, and thrilled. He hasn’t had a fight this good in more than a year, and for as much as it hurts, his body is zinging from the endorphins, and his mind is whirling with new attack plans.

“Make me a lot of them in all sizes! Armored and not.”

This time, The Manufacturer leaves with a smile on his face and a spring in his step, and an invitation to what isn’t being called a coronation, after all, republics don’t have kings, though they may have a Master.

 

 

* * *

“You’re hurt,” Rey says, voice quiet, looking at the bruises all over Kylo’s chest, shoulder, and arms. He’s usually in his office when she shifts through, but today she’s coming through to his bed, where he’s laying, very still, covered in about a dozen ice packs.

He shrugs, slowly, gently. During the fight is excellent. Right after the fight, he felt amazing. Right now, he’d consider death to be a blessing. “The training droids finally showed up. It took them a while to get all the kinks really worked out.” He looks at the purple black lines crisscrossing his arms. “These ones…”

“Unkinked?” She sits gently next to him, not wanting to jostle, or touch him too much.

“Unkinked. I haven’t been this sore in…” He doesn’t have to finish that. She was at the last fight where anyone managed to actually hit him. “They fight like humans. _Good_ humans. And they don’t have brains, so I can’t feel what they’re going to do next, so… It was a learning experience.”

“Good one?” She keeps looking him up and down thinking that maybe he didn’t need quite that many lessons at one time.

“I think so.” He rolls his eyes a little, shifts, grunts with pain. The medical droid mended the broken bones, but they still ache and will for a few days, and the bacta gel took care of the cuts, but his bruises just heal on their own. He could have pain medication. It’s available, but he refuses to take it. At best it makes him feel loopy, at worst it’ll open him up to visions he’s not interested in having. “I might not actually be a good fighter, just good at feeling what’s coming my way. Take that away, and I don’t know how to read the fight. I could only block one out of three hits.”

He can feel she wants to kiss him, but she’s not sure if she can touch him without hurting him. His tongue darts out to his bottom lip, feeling the sore, swollen part where it split when E9 hit him in the face. “Tomorrow or the day after.”

She nods and carefully lays her fingers on an inch of unbruised skin on his shoulder. He feels her mustering her own Force skills, and though she’s never intentionally tried to heal anyone before, her touch is a balm. He’s not suddenly healed, but he’s _better_ for it. The full body toothache sensation recedes, and though his eyes are closed, he guesses that the bruises are a little less black and blue.

“By the time I kill these, I will _be_ a good fighter. Force or no.”

Rey supposes that’s a good thing. “You want to spar with me?” It’s been a long time since she’s done anything with her lightstaff more complicated than mow grass, and cut prefab plates that don’t quite fit each other.

“Maybe when I heal up. Your lake is cold, and right now, a soak in hot water will just make everything worse. Go for a cold soak with me?”

“I’ll sit on the bank and keep you company.”

She takes him through to Lirium, and does sit on the bank while he dips himself in the lake, shrieking when it hits his skin, and then settling into the cold, feeling it numb everything down.

 

 

* * *

There are whispers about the disk.

The several people who have seen him train more than once have noticed that The Supreme Leader appears to be wearing a child’s toy, on a leather thong, around his neck.

The Manufacturer for example. His children enjoy that game, and he’ll admit there’s something very soothing about watching the little disk spinning around in the junjan bowl.

He has no idea of the significance of it, and isn’t about to ask, but he does mention it to several of the other owners of Epherium Inc. who are intrigued by the idea of it, but also aren’t about to ask.

After all, it doesn’t do to ask a man, The Supreme Leader, who just thrashed two or three training droids with his laser sword, why he chooses to, sometimes, wear a toy on a string.

 


	8. Three Years

12/17/35

 

The _Falcon_ landing on her plain is getting to be a familiar sight. Rey puts down her wrench, and smiles at it. She could probably finish this if she worked straight through, but…

Visitors are more fun than plumbing.

And she’s got a feeling, quickly confirmed when the _Falcon’s_ ramp drops and _three_ familiar faces meet her gaze, that she’s going to especially enjoy this visit.

She runs up to meet them, and greets Chewie with a hug, and Finn with an even bigger, more enthusiastic one, it’s been too long since she saw him last, and then hugs Rose, gently, just because she doesn’t officially _know_ doesn’t mean she doesn’t _know._ She certainly can’t see any sign of Baby Tico under Rose’s coveralls, but she can feel the glow of another life along for the ride.

“Where did you find them?” she asks Chewie. She leads them toward her settlement. Her own cottage is still in process, but she’s got three of the basic ones set up and ready to go. “Are you staying?”

 _Found ‘em round Tyccho IV._ Chewie looks at them. _Are you staying?_

Finn’s got his arm around Rose’s shoulders, and they’re both looking around. “This is starting to look a little bit like a town.”

Rey laughs at that. “It looks a bit like a… prefab cottage showroom maybe.”

Rose sniggers at that. “It looks like a new settlement. Which is what it is, so that makes sense. And staying… I think that depends on if you’ve got a place for us—“

Rey points to the cottages. “Pick one. Pick two.” She points to the unopened boxes. Chewie brought her eight of them, and five are currently in production or put together. “I’m working on getting two of them cobbled together for me.” She points to her “cottage.” The outside is done, and watertight, but the inside is still rough, missing most of the internal walls, and unfurnished. “We can do it for you, too.”

“And… if Chewie was serious about that job offer back when we first met up,” Finn finishes, looking up at Chewie.

Chewie nods. An extra set of hands, or better yet, two, especially since one of those sets is a _good_ mechanic would be _more_ than useful. Chewie’s a good mechanic, but he’s also a Wookie, and some things are just easier for those little, tiny human hands to do.

“We’ve got stuff to talk about, don’t we?” Rey says. “Come on, I’ve got… Well, not much, but you’re welcome to share it,” and she leads them to the cottage she’s been storing her stuff in, and hopes they don’t notice that there’s no _bed_ in there.

“I can make tea, and I’ve got some… well…” _protein bars from the Supremacy_ that she can’t dare to offer them _._ “fish. I have to go catch the fish first, but…”

“Tea’s great,” Rose says. 

Rey turns to the cooker, and ladles water from her cistern into her pot. “I’m working on the plumbing. I’ve got the sink in my main cottage up, but the rest of this is just sort of haphazard. So… how’d you get here? Last I heard, you were teaching what was left of the PsyOps department how to infiltrate the First Order and you were just slightly tweaking design specs.”

“And we were,” Rose says, a smile forming on her lips, and Finn is grinning, wide and steady. “But… things changed or… well… I guess you can say I noticed a change and… We don’t want to be apart anymore so…”

“We’re having a BABY, Rey!” Finn almost shouts, so excited and happy and just bubbling over with it. He jumps up and spins his friend around. “I’ve been DYING to tell EVERYONE that!” He kisses his wife. “We’re having a BABY!”

Chewie roars his congratulations as Finn hugs him, too.

Rey feels herself grinning and laughing with them.

“And we don’t want to be light years apart, and Leia’s fine with us going underground for a while, so…” Rose continues.

Finn looks to Chewie, “Do you still need someone to help out and watch your back?”

Chewie’s affirmative yowl echoes through the tiny room.

“Good, because we need a job with each other.”

“And a place to land when the baby comes, right?” Rey says.

“That’s the hope,” Rose replies. “I mean… We’re not… Intruding, right? This isn’t just a spot for Jedi, right?”

Rey shakes her head. “I don’t know a lot about what this is going to be, not yet, but I do know this won’t be a place for Jedi, period. W—I’m changing things. It’s… about balance, and the Jedi don’t _balance._ Not the way we need to be. So… Anyway, yes. Please, come. It’d be nice to have neighbors.”

 

 

* * *

After tea, and catching the fish, (which Chewie takes over on the preparation of. He’s a much better camping chef than the other three of them, and it’s possible he knows that Rey doesn’t really look like she knows what she’s doing when it comes to cooking the fish. Not the way she should if it were a main part of her diet.) they start unloading the new goodies Chewie’s brought for her.

Mostly furniture for her cottage. A bed and table and chairs. A cooker and cooler. Bedding and sheets and towels and all the _things_ that Rey didn’t really think about, but would certainly miss if they weren’t there. Stupid little bits, like spoons and cups.

She’s unpacking them and putting them in the cottage with a sense of wonder, really.

Her downed AT-AT had things she could grab and scavenge and repurpose, and she made do with what she had or could find, but this is… different. It feels like a treasure hunt, opening each box and finding places for things and…

“You look like it’s HihLo Feast, and your birthday, and the New Year all at once,” Rose says to her as Finn’s inflating her mattress, and she’s unpacking her sheets.

Rey doesn’t exactly know what that means. And it looks like Finn doesn’t really, either.

Rose has a smile, but it’s a little sad, as she looks at the windows, and says, “Curtains. It’ll be too bright otherwise.” She takes one of the sheets, and starts cutting, and then says, “Holidays. HihLo… That was the day we’d honor our dead. Get together, tell stories of the people we loved, and have a big party. Before the First Order came… feast days were easier then. We were still poor but not barely scraping by. The hunters could take a day or two off from the mines and go find young, plum frathens, and we’d build pits and fill them with wood, burn it down to embers, and then put the frathens on spikes and turn them over the coals for hours. They’d be crispy and brown and succulent, smokey and delicious. We’d put uccas and omlents into the coals, let them roast slow. My grandmother would spend all day, for three days, cooking, and my mom and sister and I would help. And when it was ready… Everyone in our town would gather for the party. New Year’s… We’d give each other little presents.” She nods to Rey sitting in front of a box, pulling out towels and pillow cases, appreciating each one as she unwraps it. “That’s probably what got me thinking of this. And New Year’s was in the cold part of the year, so everyone would stay close to the hearth. There’d be a huge cauldron of soup going on the cooker, so thick with grains and meat it was practically a porridge and…” Rose’s voice cracks. “Oh…” She blinks, hard, sniffing, putting the scissors and sheet down, sitting on Rey’s mattress, and wipes her eyes. “Sorry, _everything_ gets to me now.”

Finn sits next to her rubbing her back gently. He and Rey share a look, neither of them grew up in a world with holidays.

“We could do that, here,” Rey says. “Something to honor the people we’ve lost but not forgotten.”

Rose sniffs again. “It was always a party. A celebration. The first HihLo to pass after you’d lost someone could be sad, but all the ones after that were meant to be fun.”

“When was it?” Finn asks, and Rey can feel him understanding that Rose didn’t get a HihLo for her sister, and that he’s damn well going to do everything in his power to fix that. 

“The shortest day of the year. We’d start the celebration when the sun went down and party until it came up again.”

“It’ll take a while to figure out when that is here, but we could do that,” Rey says.

“We _will_ do that,” Finn adds.

 _What are you four conspiring about?_ Chewie asks, bringing another box in.

“I think little one is a tad young to be conspiring,” Finn says, huge grin on his face at the fact that Chewie counted their child as one of them here, now.

“Holidays. Did you have any special celebrations on Kashyyyk?” Rose asks.

He sets the box down, and decides to “test out” the chair Rey’s tucked into what will be the corner of her main room, once she gets the wall to divide it from her bedroom up. It’s wider than any chair she’s ever seen before, but not quite a sofa. It holds Chewie just fine, so it should have no problem with her and Kylo.  _A few. Most of them won’t work here. Can’t celebrate your home tree in a place with no trees._ He smiles at Rose and Finn. _Got one you might like. Might come in handy in eight or nine months. When our children were born we’d have a naming ceremony for them. Sort of a ‘welcome to life’ party. The child’s parents were assumed to be tired and busy, so the rest of the town would put together a party for them, usually about a month or two after the child was born. And that’s when they’d show the child off to everyone and tell everyone outside of their immediate family its name._

“Good food and drink and music?” Finn asks.

_Absolutely. Presents, too. Nappies and bum salve at the bare minimum, and usually promises of lessons in whatever that person specialized in. Apprenticeship offers. Make sure the newest member of your forest had options for life outside of the nursery._

“We are definitely doing that!” Rey says. 

 

 

* * *

A bit later, when it’s just Rey and Chewie, she quietly says to him, “Next time you come, can you bring me more packaged food?”

Chewie glances at her, and she’s suddenly very aware of the fact that she’s gained a little weight. Not much, she stops eating when she’s full, but some of the hollow and sharp edges from years of just, barely, not quite enough, are fading away.

_I know he’s not letting you go hungry._

“No! Of course not. But… I can’t exactly offer you guys protein bars stamped with the First Order logo, can I?”

 _Protein bars?_ There’s withering derision in Chewie’s expression. _Tell me he’s doing better by you than that. If he’s not, I’m going to shoot him in the other side._

Rey laughs at that. She knows enough about Wookie culture to know that _not_ feeding your mate is a gross dereliction of husbandly duties, and if said husband doesn’t provide, his wife has the right to not just divorce him, but to shave his head, too. She’s never much contemplated what a bald Wookie looks like, but Chewie was so appalled at the idea that it’s got to be horrible. (She also hasn’t much contemplated if this means Chewie’s divorced. As best she knows, he hasn’t seen his wife in decades.)

“That’s just what I have here. Breakfast and dinner is on his ship, and yes, it’s real food.”

Chewie nods, slowly. Apparently, satisfied that Kylo’s doing at least the bare minimum job he’s supposed to do. _Good. What do you want?_

“I don’t know. What’s… appropriate to feed people who just happen to stop by?”

_I’ll get more of what I keep in the Falcon for you._

“Thanks.”

 

* * *

By the time they’ve got everything into her cottage, and put together, it’s getting late, and it’s _hot._

And the lake is _cold._

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m getting a swim!” Finn says.

“It’s going to be _cold!_ ” Rey calls out.

“That’s the _point!_ ” he says back, stripping out of his shirt and trousers.

“Really cold!” Rey adds, smirking, enjoying how she knows this is going to go.

“How cold?” Rose asks.

Chewie starts to laugh.

“I’d take my boots off and—“ And that gets cut off as a naked Finn goes streaking across the stone beach, diving into the water, and _screams_ as soon as he hits it.

“Oh FUCK it’s COLD!” he yells, more or less bouncing out of the water a bare second after he hits it.

“-put a toe in,” Rey finishes. Both she and Rose start to laugh as Finn comes tearing back out of the water to rub himself down as fast as he can. Chewie’s all but rolling around in the grass, he’s laughing so hard at this.

“Oh… it’s liquid ice.” He’s shivering. “How can water be _that_ cold on a day this hot?”

Rey shrugs. “All I know is I _don’t_ swim in it.”

Finn turns his back on them as he pulls his shorts on, and Rey sees the scar down his back, long, jagged. Faded to a dull pink, but not the white of an old scar, not yet. Though, it occurs to her that she’s never seen an old scar on a dark-skinned person before, and she doesn’t know if it’ll go white or brown or… whatever.

Unlike the scars she left on Kylo with her lightsaber, Finn’s scar isn’t a thin line. She wonders if that’s because of his jagged blade, or the different medical services available.

Or… the scar bisects is spine. Or it’s likely they had significantly more important parts of Finn to fix than his skin, so his skin got a lot less attention than his spine.

She reaches a hand toward his back, and then says, “Can I try something?”

He looks over his shoulder, and Rose who’s been watching the way Rey’s looking at Finn says, “What sort of something.”

“Healing is supposed to be a Force skill. I probably can’t make it go away, but… maybe I can make it better?”

“How does it work?” Finn asks.

“Uh…” Rey rubs her lips together. “I can… feel… your energy. Everyone sort of flows, and in places that aren’t healed right, the flow gets sluggish or tangled and… maybe I can untangle it some?”

“You don’t sound very certain,” Rose says.

“I’ve… only read about it,” Rey can see the level of interest Chewie’s got in this, likely thinking of another scarred man he knows who has access to Rey. “And… I think it only works if the person you’re working on wants it to. But… maybe… I mean, if you don’t want to, I completely understand. I wouldn’t be volunteering to hand my body over to someone who’s never actually done anything like this before, so…”

“Sure. Just, stop if I say stop, okay?” Finn replies.

“Okay.” She sits down and pats the grass in front of her, and Finn sits in front of her, back to her.

She trails a finger down the scar. “That doesn’t hurt, does it?”

“No. I’ve got no feeling there, at all. The scar, and a lot of what’s under it, is numb. And when it’s not numb, it’s itchy, but the kind you can’t scratch. Deep inside itchy.”

Rose has come to sit next to Rey, watching this with interest.

Rey lays her palm in the center of Finn’s back, and just feels it. Then she puts Rose’s hand on top of hers, and Rose gasps a little at it.

“Oh… That’s…” A wide grins spreads across her face. She’s hooking into what Rey’s feeling, going along through the flows and whorls and… “That’s amazing. It’s all blue and glow-y and…” She kisses Finn’s shoulder. “So pretty, love, so pretty.”

Rey keeps feeling, and finds the slow, dark, thick and sluggish spots.

“It’s like an electric current trying to get through a bad conductor. Like it’s been zipping through hasmian smelt and suddenly finds itself in a cheap copper compound. It’s all diffuse.”

Rey has no idea if that’s right or not, but she doesn’t see any reason to argue with it. She’s also not entirely sure what to do with it. It’s not tangled, just _slow._

“If you were a ship, or a machine, I’d know how to fix this just by holding it. I can feel the problem, but… I don’t know what to do with it.” She lifts her hand off of Finn’s back. He turns to look at her. “Everything is going where it’s supposed to go, it’s just _slow._ If it were knotted up or tangled… I’d be able to get it moving right.”

“I guess it was worth a try,” Finn says, reaching for his shirt, and then shaking his head. It really is too damn hot for it, and no one here cares if he’s naked or not.

 _Looks like it was patched up right. You can’t fix it because there’s nothing to fix,_ Chewie adds. _It just needs time._  

 

* * *

They’re eating yet another meal of tea, and fish, seasoned and perked up with some freeze dried supplies that Chewie had in the Falcon. The blue sun has set, the green one is hovering over the horizon, and they’ll break up for the night soon, but right now, sitting on the grass near the lake, a small fire keeping the bugs away, it’s really pleasant.

Rey wishes that Kylo could be here for this. Actually, she doesn’t. Because she knows how that would work. Chewie’s made it clear he won’t hurt Kylo, but he also won’t voluntarily be anywhere near him, so he’d stalk off to the _Falcon_. Finn would have his blaster in hand and firing before he could think. Rose would be up, back to back with him, fighting, too. Kylo would stop the bolts and have his saber out and… These days she’s sure Kylo wouldn’t start a fight with her friends, but she’s not at all certain he wouldn’t _end_ one.

So, she doesn’t wish Kylo were here. That’s a disaster.

She wishes for a time when he could be here, peacefully.

And her heart aches at that, because she doesn’t feel it coming anytime soon. He can talk about killing the past all he likes. He can change the present. But that doesn’t mean everyone else’s past is going anywhere anytime soon.

And thinking of that makes something else come to mind… She should, probably, because she’s technically part of it, ask how the Resistance is resisting, or something like that.

She and Chewie don’t talk about it. He knows who she sleeps with and understands that she’s significantly happier not knowing because she doesn’t feel like she has to tell anyone anything about what’s going on. But…

“How’s Poe doing?” that seems like a safe way to nudge the topic.

Finn rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “Bored. So bored. He’s technically Admiral Poe now, but he thinks that’s worthless. ‘Can’t be an Admiral without a fleet.’”

“He’s not wrong,” Rose replies. “And there’s no fleet. They’re up to…”

“Four ships. Three fighters. One cruiser. He tells me he’s on the verge of sweet talking a baronet in Canto Bight out of enough credits to buy another fighter.”

“Didn’t Leia get a pile of money out of the Ygrines?” Rey was there for that, so…

“Yes, but…” Rose says.

Chewie adds the rest. _When your force is small, you only buy the things you need. She doesn’t know what the next attack is, so she’s not buying anything until she knows what she needs for it. Mostly she’s paying off her debts, making sure that when the time comes, people will be willing to loan her money again._

Finn nods. “PsyOps is talking about putting people into the First Order. He’s—“ She hears it, knowing that Kylo and the First Order are synonyms in Finn’s mind. “got those recruiting stations, so fake a few slaves, send them in, and then sabotage from there. That just needs people, not ships.”

“You don’t like that plan,” Rey can feel how disgusted the idea makes him.

“I don’t. Unless he’s completely revamped the training process that’s just…” he shakes his head. “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. I wouldn’t make Ren go through First Order training. I wouldn’t make _Phasma_ go through First Order training. There’s no one in the universe I hate that much.”

“The PsyOps guys are fairly sure that Finn’s a one of a kind.” Rose says. Proud of her man, dismaying of this plan. “Most people aren’t that stubborn, and unless they can find the right people, and even with them, putting them through First Order training is likely to just make more First Order soldiers.”

“Leia likes your plans,” Finn says to Rose. “She’s been moving through the First Order suppliers, just, slightly tweaking the alloy mixes of a few of the components.”

Rose grins. “Those Citykillers he’s building.” She laughs. “They’ll make big explosions all right, just not where he wants them. It’s amazing, just up the amount of carbon in a mix by a few milligrams per kilo and suddenly… boom! Too much heat and the metal shatters. I break in, find the specs, and then just barely change the numbers. Usually just find the lowest 3 on a decimal and shift it to a 6. That way if someone is really checking the numbers they’ll think it’s a typo. But once someone fires one of those puppies…” She smiles, imaging the destruction that will happen when the superheated laser of a Citykiller come in contact with the wrong alloy.

Rey grins, too, but it’s only on her face. She’s feeling a gnawing sensation inside, not sure what to do with this. “How’s Leia?” she asks, trying to get away from sabotaged Citykillers.  

Rose and Finn both start off on how amazing Leia is, and how she’s keeping everything together, and how she’s working hard and planning away and—

 _Tired._ Chewie cuts them off. He looks at the other two who are, honestly, more than a bit star struck by Leia. _She’s tired. Too much job, not enough money or people, no idea what to do next, and Ren’s not making it easy for her because he’s not attacking anything so her_ he nods to Rose _sabotages aren’t doing anything._

Both Finn and Rose look horrified at that. “She’s doing the best she possibly can!” Rose says, indignant.

_Yes, she is. It’s not enough._

“Chewie!” Finn is horrified.

Chewie smirks at him. _She’s Han’s mate, so I’ll help out and fly her around to the end of time if necessary, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got to pretend she’s on the verge of winning anything or that the Resistance is in any sort of decent shape. I am not required to lie about the nature of reality for her. That was never part of the deal._

He looks to Rey, and she understands what he’s saying to her.

_Ren’s doing okay._

Finn’s so horrified by that he can’t speak.

_He’s not worth resisting right now, and I think that’s a lot of why she doesn’t know what to do. It’d be easy if she could sweep in and sabotage an attack on a civilian population, or shut down a raid to steal children for the First Order, or destroy a weapon’s test before he fired it, but… He’s not doing anything like that, so she doesn’t have anything to do to him._

Rey doesn’t know if Chewie can feel her thoughts. But she tries _message received._ As long as Kylo plays by ‘the rules’ he’s not going to have any active trouble from the Resistance. At least, not trouble from his mother, not when she’s got barely two ships to rub together.

 

 

* * *

“Chewie again?” Kylo asks when she shifts through to his rooms, quite a bit later than usual.

She nods, watching him. He’s already in is bed, reading. His tunic’s hung up, but he’s still in his black shirt and trousers. Bare feet, though. And he hasn’t pulled his hair out of the knot he’s been wearing it in recently. She knows her balance spiral is around his throat today, though tucked under his shirt, she can only catch a bit of reflection on it when he shifts in the light.

“Trouble?” he can feel her thinking, hating what she knows, and that she’s got to _do_ something with it.

She slowly closes her eyes, and then opens them, looking at him, taking the leap of faith. She already trusts him with her life, now she’s trusting him with everyone else’s. Trusting that if he’s going to use his weapons it’ll be for a good reason. He can feel her do it, and for a moment looks really pleased, if a little concerned, and then she says, “Your next spot check. I don’t know where exactly the problem is, but… The alloys on your Citykillers are off. They won’t fire properly now, and… You _can’t_ make a big deal about knowing they don’t fire properly. Fix it, but silently.”

He realizes what she’s telling him, and how she must know, and nods, slowly. “I can do that.”

“Thank you.”

“I take it you didn’t just have Chewie visit, then?”

She sits on the side of the bed. “Rose and Finn, too, with good news,” she thinks about it, trying to remember if she already told him this as she takes off her boots before kneeling a little in front of him. She’s known since the wedding, but… “I haven’t told you she’s pregnant, yet, have I?”

“No, and yet?” he puts his datapad down, wrapping an arm around her, kissing her forehead.

“I could feel it at their wedding. Tiny little life glowing away.” She smiles at that. “They’re ecstatic.”

She watches Kylo feeling that, not entirely sure what’s going through his head, which is odd, because she usually has a very good read on him, and then comes to the conclusion that he likely also doesn’t know what’s going through his head right now.

Eventually he comes up with, “Congratulations?”

Rey laughs a little, snuggling up close to him. “I’m going to be Aunt Rey.”

“When?”

She thinks about it. “Seven or so months, I think.”

“Are they… staying?”

“Eventually. They’re flying with Chewie now, and… Oh.”

He nods slowly. Part of why he didn’t know what was going on in his mind is rapidly clearing for him. If she’s suddenly got Finn and Rose living next door, will he still be able to visit? Will it still be a space for _them?_ He’s been aware of the idea that new students would be moving in, but both of them had been thinking of children who… actually… well…

_Fuck. I’m the most recognizable man in the galaxy._

“You’re thinking loudly,” she says, voice gentle, hoping maybe he’d _talk_ about what he’s thinking.

“I remember you saying that you were fairly sure Chewie wouldn’t kill me on sight.”

“He won’t.” She shakes her head a little. “He thinks you’re my Han, which is… I don’t know, probably more than I needed to know about how he feels about your Dad, but…”

Kylo thinks about that for a good ten seconds before deciding that he is neither physically or mentally capable of even attempting to untangle the emotional complexities of that sentence, and goes back to Finn and Rose, who he thinks he can parse.

“I don’t remember you ever getting close to suggesting that Finn or Rose would have any reservations about that.”

She inclines her head a little, not exactly wanting to say that he’s dead right about that, but not going to lie, either. “They might decide that trying to capture you is a better plan. Hand you over to-“

“My mother.” He nods. His voice is achingly dry as he says, “My opinion of being drugged into a truth spewing mass, tortured, and then executed for war crimes _hasn’t_ improved since we last talked about this.”

She strokes his hand. “That’s not happening.” She’s thinking that right now Leia’s keeping things at detente, but… if she had Kylo… Even if she wanted to…

But Kylo’s moving on from there, not following her thoughts because he’s deep in his. “Only because I can literally teleport my body away from a fight with them. And you can, too.”

“Me?” She’s not understanding why she’d need to port away.

“You think they wouldn’t try a move against you if they thought it would bring me out of hiding?”

“Finn and Rose? Kylo,” she shakes her head, “just… No. That’s not how the game is played. Not on this side.”

He rolls his eyes, expression sharp. “Spoken like someone who’s never actually seen them play the game. A hopeless, dangerous, near-impossible, suicide mission in which an inordinately _stupid_ number of the Rebellion and then Resistance troops get killed to take out _one_ big target is the _only_ play in their book. That’s how they took down both Death Stars, and Starkiller, and _the Fulminatrix_ , and got the plans for both Death Stars, and… I spent most of my childhood hearing stories about how my parents and their friends died or almost died in daring attacks against some big target. Rey, I’m the biggest target left in the game, and yes, they prefer volunteers for the hopeless, dangerous, near-impossible, suicide mission, but to take someone like me out they may decide to not be too picky about volunteers.” Left unspoken is how if they go against her, he’s going to personally kill every single member of the Resistance, making sure that an attempt on her is the biggest, stupidest, highest costing mistake they ever make. She can feel his dark flaring, both in protection of her, and _wanting_ that sort of fight. Him against everything else in the service of protecting _her._ His skin, his Force, his mind are all _singing_ at the idea of it.

Rey licks her lips, and makes the gamble. She’s betting on Kylo to be good, now she’s laying those same odds on her friends. It’s based on nothing but feelings, hope, and the memory of a few moments on a beach when two people she adored knelt in front of each other and promised to build a life, together, for the rest of their days.

She takes his hand in hers, laying her light against his dark. _I’m here. I’m safe._ His fight doesn’t exactly retreat at that, but it does calm, some.

“I didn’t see it. I was in the _Falcon_ , with Chewie drawing your fighters away. And I don’t know if you saw it, because you were focused on running the attack, but… When you brought the battering ram canon in on Crait, Poe, and Finn, and Rose, and a half dozen other members of the Resistance, anyone who had any chance of keeping one of the little fliers they had going in a fairly straight line, all lined up to go on a big, stupid, let’s get us all killed on the off chance one of us can take out the big target run against the battering ram canon.”

“Your men shot down most of them, and Poe, having finally learned that the big, stupid, let’s all get killed to take down a massive target style of attack likely wasn’t a good plan, called off the attack. Do you remember that?”

He blinks, thinking back, but… “Not really. I’d given the order to get the little fighters out of the way, and was paying attention to the _Falcon_. I could feel you up there, and half of me wanted to see everything burn, all of it, all of us, all at once, let it all die in fire, and half was begging you to fly fast and hard and get away.”

“Did you hate me then?”

“ _Very_ much.”

She nods. She felt it then, too. “It was killing me when you didn’t stop the attack. You killed Snoke, and I just…” She swallows at the memory of her hope freezing, withering, cracking, breaking with her heart. “And then it all fell apart.”

“Because you wanted _Ben_.” There’s a lot of heat in that word, a lot of disgust, and shame, and a history of not ever being what people wanted him to be, of never being good enough as he was, as Kylo. “Wanted a wayward Jedi you could take home to Luke. Wanted him to suddenly just pop up and end the attack and…” The aching disappointment, both of theirs is still raw, and that’s not a moment either of them want to spend to long thinking about. Kylo takes them away from that moment. “Anyway… you were saying…”

“Finn was the lead fighter. He was the one with the good straight shot, right at the battering ram canon, and he had it. Fly right into the beam, ram the ram, and blow it up.” She smacks her fist into her palm. “And he was going to do it, resigned, ready, and then Rose crossed the beam and knocked him out of the way, crashed both of them.”

Kylo blinks. He snorts a quick laugh. “That’s the most sensible thing I think I’ve ever heard of a member of the Resistance doing. Flying into the ram would have burnt Finn to ash long before he could have hit the condensing crystal.”

Rey smiles a little at that. “She told him that they weren’t going to win by killing the things they hate, but by saving the things they loved.” She strokes his hand again. “We’re building. Homes, and lives, and loves. And we’re going to _win_ , all of it, the future, our families, your Order, all of it, we’re getting it by dedicating ourselves to cherishing and enriching what we love.”

He lays his hand on her thigh, and kisses the top of her head, then pulls back to look her in the eye. “And would you have me there, in the open, your _lover,_ for all to see?”

She winces, hating what she’s going to say, but saying it anyway, because she knows her balance is tenuous, and Kylo Ren, Supreme Leader of the First Order will tip it out of alignment. “Not yet. Three years. Let them see that you’re not—“

“Me?” his voice is sharp, and she’s not sure how much of the cut is directed at her or at himself.

“Snoke. Let me have enough time, so when I say, ‘he’s not The First Order’ they’ll believe it.”

“They’ll never believe it. Some things cannot be forgiven.”

She strokes his face. “Am I sitting here next to you?”

He rests his forehead against hers, eyes closing, like he can’t stand to look at her right now. She can feel his anger, both at him, for being _Kylo Ren_ , and at her and her friends. She touches it with her calm, flooding him with how much she wants and values him, and for a moment they both breathe. And in another moment, she feels him relax and believe her feelings. This is a pause, not a rejection.

 

 

She gently squeezes the back of his neck, and says, “We ripped each other’s hearts out and we’re here now. Give me time, Kylo. Time to let anger cool and memories fade. And yes, there will be a day when I kiss you in front of everyone in the galaxy who ever mattered to me. There will be a day when you are in my home, in my town, in my life and _everyone_ will know.” She rests her hand on his chest. “And there will be a day when it will be _our_ home, _our_ town, and _our_ life.”

He inhales, hard, shaky, eyes hot and intense on her, and then nods, slowly, before saying, voice tight, “Three years.”

“Three years.”

 


	9. Lock

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some NSFW artwork with this chapter.

 

1/1/36 ABY: Lirium

 

Rey’s hideout among the plains is starting to look vaguely settlement… ish.

The fact that it’s only her is part of why it looks not quite right. It would take the casual observer more than a few minutes to figure out what’s wrong. The collection of tidy cottages, a small, straight dirt road, and further back, on a small rise in the ground, a clear dome near the lake, all of that looks fine.

It’s just the complete lack of people that makes it look wrong.

Rey’s north of her town, on the plain, moving rocks. The _Falcon_ has landed several times, and each time they’ve run into the same problem, a problem that Rose, now that she’s on the _Falcon_ , has gotten serious about. Namely, if they want to keep the _Falcon_ in good shape they can’t keep landing it on uneven, boulder-strewn, fields.

Every time they lift off, she’s got a new chunk of landing gear to fix.

And these days, where she falls asleep if she’s standing still for too long, and irritable from the pregnancy sickness, she’s not fixing anything she doesn’t have to. Which both Finn and Chewie think is a perfectly acceptable response to being ten weeks pregnant.

Which means Rey is north of town, levitating rocks away from a field, and then moving them to the perimeter of the field so that the clear zone is easily visible.

Kylo finds her out there, a little earlier than normal. She raises an eyebrow at him, seeing that he’s got not just food (which he often brings) but a bottle of something, too.

He looks around. “You want help finishing this, or shall we eat while it’s hot?”

“There’s only a few minutes of good light left. Let’s get this done.”

He nods, and begins to move rocks as well.

“You know, if you had told me this time last year that 90% of starting up a settlement was moving rocks, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Rey says.

He’s raising one of the further back ones, and carefully dumps it several meters away, on the line. “If you’d asked me this time last year, what was involved in starting up a settlement, I wouldn’t have had an answer for you.”

They’re both learning that making a place for people to live, even sincerely uncomplicated people with fairly simple needs, is _involved_. Unfortunately, it mostly involves making rough things smooth, bumpy things flat, and rocky things somewhere else.

They don’t talk much after that. It’s easier to do, even for them, if they don’t split their concentration. But after a few moments, the green sun does sink, and they find themselves in twilight.

It’s been a week or so since he’s come to her here. “Is it getting dark earlier?”

“A little. I think this might be turning to autumn.” They both know that there shouldn’t be too much variation between night and day here, no matter season it is.

“Do you think it’ll get cold?”

She shrugs. “Rainy maybe. It shouldn’t be too different than summer.” He takes her hand in his, and they walk through ‘her town’ to her cottage.

Part of him not having been here recently is that she only finished it yesterday. Part of it is Chewie, Finn, and Rose left yesterday.

That said, she’s eager to show him her first ever, real, home.

And Kylo’s got food, so… her first real meal in her first real home.

She presses her palm to the sensor, opens the door, and shows it off with real pride. “What do you think?”

He’s looking around, then steps in, and can feel the pleasure bubbling off of her, so he’s pleased, for her.

“Look around!” she says.

There are three rooms. He’s walked into the one that’s half of the house. There’s a workbench against the one side. It’s covered in tools and the bits and pieces she’s working on. On the other, there’s a cooker and a cooler and a sink. She’s put up shelves, and there aren’t a lot of supplies on them, but for someone who got paid by the meal for most of her life, having a week or so of food stored up feels like unimaginable wealth.

She goes to the sink and turns it on. Water come sputtering out. “I’m still getting the plumbing set, but… Look! Water!” He knows she’s been fighting with that, the pump from the lake is stubborn, and tetchy, and older than she is, so it’s not in the greatest shape. He pulls her into a close hug and kisses the top of her head and tries his best to feel really pleased and enthusiastic about this.

There’s a table and benches, a big soft chair in the corner, the sort of thing that’s big enough for her to sit across, or for both of them to sit side by side, and a rug on the floor, and she’s made a wreath out of the grass and put it on the door.

He pokes his head into the next room and finds a snug bedroom. The bed takes up most of it, and he smiles at that. He’d been hoping she’d get something big enough for both of them. And dreading that Chewie might bring her a tiny cot, with barely enough room for her. The blankets look soft and nubby. He smiles a little, the top one is tan, but the sheets under it are green. The room is filled with browns and tans and some gray-green from another of those grass wreathes. There are a few pillows, and they seem poofy enough.

“Is it comfortable?” he asks, sitting down on it, bouncing a little.

“I think so. Haven’t slept in it, yet,” but he knows that. She hops into his lap, grinning at him. “Gonna test it tonight?”

He doesn’t have to fake any enthusiasm for that. “Yes!”

She’s got a window that looks out on the lake, and he can feel this is one of Rose’s touches, a set of curtains. Given that at some point other people may live here, he’s appreciating the curtains. Right now, if the mood strikes him, he’ll walk around the lake naked, but he can’t imagine that will be an option all that much longer. Sooner or later someone will move here. Finn and Rose plan to be here fulltime in not more than six more months, and she’ll go looking for new… whatever they are going to be called… or someone will bring her one.

The days of it being just her, just them, are numbered and dwindling.

There are hooks on the wall it shares with the kitchen/work space. The clothing she’s not wearing now is hanging from it.

On the other wall, there’s a door leading to the third room.

“Refresher?”

“Soon.” She glares at that room, and then opens the door so he can see. It’s basic, but has everything: sink, toilet, shower, clothing washer. “I’ve got basic plumbing. The shower isn’t exactly doing the job, yet.”

“Which job?” (Though he doesn’t mind if it never works, because that means more time with her in his shower.)

“The get-water-to-come-pouring-out-of-the-top-and-not-out-of-the-pipes-in-the-wall job. And it’d be nice if some of that water was at least vaguely warm.”

“Ah.” He’s heard how the water heaters that come with these pre-fab buildings leave something, by which he means, everything, to be desired.

Still, it’s a house. And she’s never had one before, not one that was _hers,_ and she’s excited, so he smiles at it and hopes she doesn’t work too hard to feel what’s under the smile.

She leads him back to her main room and nods to the food on the table. “What’d you bring?”

“Do you know what a rabbit is?” he says, pulling the bench back enough for them to sit.

“No.” She says, sitting down, for a moment, before remembering they’ve got to get the drink out of the bottle and into something else.

“I don’t either.” He sits down. It’s a good bench, sturdy, doesn’t creak or complain about his weight the way some have over the years. And it, and the table, are big enough he doesn’t feel like his knees are brushing his chin. All in all, it’s good. “I’ve been told they’re tasty, and it’s cooked into some sort of pie.”

“Chef’s choice, again?” she says, over her shoulder, looking through a drawer for something to open the bottle. He supposes he could use his lightsaber, but that’s likely asking to start a fire.

“Not this time. C8 tells me this is traditional.”

“For what?”

“This is a meal eaten for good luck on the first day of the New Year.” He touches the bottle, too. “Plum brandy. Good luck meal for a good year.”

“It’s a New Year?” She hasn’t been watching the calendar too closely.

“Thirty-six years after the Battle of Yavin.”

“Oh.”

“Year one of The Order, soon.”

That gets a smile from her. She’s heard his plans for this, been helping with them, some, and knows they’re getting close. The next step of Operation: Kill The Past is to literally kill the First Order. New symbol, new name, new… Orders. “Ready?”

“Getting there. Frakes tells me the badges are all ready to go and the banners are coming along, and then...”

“How are you doing with getting high muckety-mucks to come?”

He shrugs. “I’ve given my top twenty commanders five more days to each come up with a hundred names.”

“So, you don’t know who you’re inviting?” She finds the bottle opener, and wiggles it at him. She’s got a bottle opener, and just having one makes her happy.

“Or care for that matter. For me, it’s about the show, not so much the people who see it.”

“How do your commanders feel about that?”

“Palpatine’s men are licking it up, carefully building lists of everyone they’ve ever wanted any favor with, or who may do us some good. Snoke’s men are bored and can’t believe I’d even pull a stunt like this. So, I’m making Palpatine’s men cut their lists down to a hundred, and poking Snoke’s to think of a hundred people to invite.”

She opens the bottle, pulling the cork out, and gets a mug, and then two. He sees how proud she is to have mugs plural _._ Not just one cup that everything goes in. She pours one for him, handing it over, and one for her, and takes a sip, and then chokes on it. “Ughl…” She shudders and coughs. “Do people drink this on purpose?”

After that reception, he’s not sure if he wants any, but he does take a sip. It’s _strong._ He honestly couldn’t tell you if it was made from plums or paint stripper, all he can taste is ALCOHOL.

He doesn’t drink much, because he doesn’t, generally, like the way it makes him feel. (Like with painkillers, at best it makes him foggy and at worst he ends up in visions he’s not interested in seeing. He only accepted the bottle because the chance to drink here, somewhere he could get a little foggy in the head and not have it be an issue, was involved.) So when he does, he prefers something that genuinely tastes _good_.

He takes the mugs, gets up, and pours them into her sink, and then pours them water. Not exactly a rare or expensive vintage, unlike the brandy, but even with the strong mineral flavor, it’s preferable to the brandy.

He takes a drink, and hands her a glass, once she’s drunk, he says, “Here’s to the first year of The Order.”

She offers him a bit of a smile and looks up at him. He knows what she’s asking for, silently, and fishes the token from under his tunic, and hands it over. She places it over her head.

Then… he does something he’s never done before… Not, since he’s been an adult, not in someone else’s home. It may be verging on autumn out there, but it’s still more than warm enough inside her home. He doesn’t need the clothing for warmth, and it’s not like he’s got to project any sort of image here, so he takes his tunic off, hanging it on one of the posts in her bedroom (noticing that she has, apparently, a post just for him and his clothing), and puts his boots next to her door.

She watches him doing that, wiggling his toes against her rug, making himself at home in her home, and smiles.

He looks around and decides that they likely need plates and forks and… stuff. He shakes his head. “You know, I used to do this every meal.”

“When you were a child?”

“No. My mother’s house had servants.” His voice turns a bit sarcastic. “Senator Organa, Princess of Alderaan, for all of her I’m-just-like-everyone-else, didn’t cook or serve her own meals.”

Though having said that, he feels her memory of Leia making sure everyone had their meal bars in the _Falcon_ , handing them out, brewing tea, offering cups to everyone.

Kylo rolls his eyes. Of course she did it for the Resistance. But not for him. “She didn’t ever do it at our home. But, meals were communal at Luke’s. We all cooked, and all served, and all cleaned up.” He fetches them forks and plates, laying them on the table efficiently, then sitting next to her. “That’s not how it worked with Snoke. Entire divisions were assigned to mess work. Command officers, even though I wasn’t officially one, I had the privileges of one, _never_ set foot in the kitchens. You could eat in one of the canteens, or have them bring you a meal, but if you got near one of the kitchens you _better_ be on orders to arrest someone. That’s a rule I’ve kept.”

 

 

That seems really off to Rey, and he can feel she’s stumped by that rule.

“Two reasons, first off, kitchen hygiene,” he says, cutting the pie. “If your entire force is on ships and you are the biggest gun in the galaxy, the biggest threat to your men isn’t another fleet, it’s food poisoning. Some idiot hits the ‘freshers, doesn’t clean up properly, handles the food, and next thing you know an entire division is down. Second of all, advancement through the ranks isn’t always about merit. One of his generals was poisoned by a different one…” He shrugs, everyone is dead now. There’s no one he can hurt with the story. “Hux, he and Phasma poisoned his father, who was another of Snoke’s men. After that, only kitchen staff were allowed in the kitchen, and I got wary of accepting meals I didn’t make, or at least open, for myself.”

She looks at the pie, and the plate she’s holding out for a piece of it, and suddenly isn’t so sure she wants to eat it, or give it to him.

He reads that from her. “C8 scans everything before I take a bite of it, or offer it to you.”

She’s never actually seen C8. He lives, mostly, in Kylo’s throne room, though he spends some time in his office and personal chambers. Just, not when she’s there.

He takes his fork, scoops up of a bit of the pie, her piece of it, and chews it, thoughtfully.

“Good?” she asks. She tried the brandy, he gets to be the test subject for the pie.

He shrugs.

She tries a bite. Rich, savory, a little sweet, a bit meaty. She’s had things she liked better, but it’s not bad. “A billion times better than the portions I used to get.”

He nods. “And protein bars.”

They continue eating, and she spends a moment really sensing him. “You’re off.”

He shrugs a bit at that.

“It’s the house… it’s… what?”

He’s sure she can likely get enough of it just by feeling him, but sometimes she likes to hear him say words. Maybe it helps make things clearer in his mind, or hers, or…

“It’s a good house, and I’m glad you built it and love it and…”

“And…”

He looks around, and lifts one shoulder, and chews his pie. “And it’s you, and it’s something you want and…” and some things are hard to lend voice to, some things just don’t want to escape his lips, but he’s thinking it very clearly, _and there’s so much more I’d give you if you’d let me._ He shrugs the one shoulder again. “But you don’t want more. You want this, so…” He looks around at her tidy, modest cottage. “This.”

She nods. “This.” She stretches, and her back pops audibly when she does it. “I think about… more, sometimes. Because I know you… can… or would… And it’d be easier. And part of me would like easier. Especially this afternoon when I turned on the shower and instead of water coming out of the faucet, it was rushing inside my wall. I would have really _liked_ easier then.” He has the image of her cursing away as she pulled back the inside layer of the wall, water spraying everywhere before she got it turned off, and then the hours of cleaning everything up before being able to start fixing the problem.

He smiles a little, at that.

“But it’s not just that this is me… I feel like this… building it. Literally putting it together with my hands, is important. So much of this work is just… mindless moving… that it gives me time to think, and I need that. This is part of… learning whatever it is I’m here to learn.” She thinks for another moment on how to put it into words. “I think better if I’m doing something. That was true at Orlac’s” she’s said it before she realizes she’s not supposed to, and winces a little.

Kylo shakes his head, letting it float past him. He can think about his wayward cousin… or, given where he ended up compared to Orlac, perhaps he’s the wayward cousin, later.

“I need to be doing something with my body and hands, otherwise I just get bored or jittery. I can’t _think_ if all I’m doing is sitting around.”

“I know.” And he does. He can sit and study for hours because he spent years learning how to do it, but he also needs to carve out time to run around and hit things to keep himself able to do that. They’ve both got big questions with no easy answers, and they need the space to find those answers. “But if you ever…”

“Trust me, you’ll know.” She spears a piece of her pie. “You said you weren’t ever going to be a monk teaching children to meditate. I’m never going to be one of those fancy ladies spinning through ballrooms and making small talk.”

He laughs at that. “And do you see a version of this with me in a fancy ballroom making small talk?”

“That’s what rich and powerful people do, right? That’s what you’re going to do with your High and Mighties, right?”

“Not in my experience. It’s certainly not part of what I’ve got planned for the thousands of them my commanders are going to import.”

“Uh huh,” she gives him a gentle shove with her shoulder. “Master Ren.”

He gives her a little shove back. “Mistress Rey.”

 

 

* * *

It’s a good bed. Granted these days, Kylo’s primary definition of good concerning beds is: “Is Rey located in it?” If the answer is yes, it’s a good bed.

That said, it’s also comfortable, the sheets feel nice against his skin, the pillows are big enough his head feels supported and firm enough he’s not going to be smothered in them.

It’s a good bed.

But, mostly, Rey’s in it. And they’re going to _test_ it out.

 

 

* * *

He’s about to reach over for the slick when two thoughts occur to him. One: the drawer under his bed with the slicks in it is currently conveniently located on the other side of the galaxy, and yes, he knows he can get himself to them easily, he's not exactly interested in going anywhere other than where he is right now, and Two: it’s the New Year. Which means they don’t need them anymore.

She wasn’t sure about his sudden hesitation. He’d been doing that thing, where he kisses along her breast and shoulder and arm, which lets him slip over far enough to grab the slicks, but not have to stop touching her, and then he stopped dead about the time he got his lips to her elbow. She sees his grin and catches the feel of it.

Then she grins back at him, and flips them so she’s on top.

“You were on top the last time we did this skin to skin.”

He likes her on top just as much as he likes him on top, so he just smiles up at her and wiggles a little, and then groans, loud, when she slides down him.

He can feel it’s not that much of a different sensation for her, skin to skin and skin to slick feel about the same from her point of view, but it’s _distinctly_ different for him.

He’s holding very still, not wanting to spurt, yet, sure that if he gets through this moment, he’ll be fine, but it’s so… _intense_. It’s so… _real._ So… _her._ His jaw is clenched and he’s biting his lip, holding her hips, keeping her still, too, because he can feel she wants to start rocking on him.

He kisses her, hard, deep, tongue moving fast, the way she wishes his hips were, and projects how this feels to him. How wet and plush and snug and silky and gloriously _her_ this feels and it’s deeply satisfying to hear/feel her moan all over at it.

Another moment, and the need to spurt _now_ eases off, and he can move, and let her move, and from there, they glow.

 

* * *

His fingers drawing down her back in a long, slow pull. Fingertips barely brushing over her skin, lighting goosebumps all along her.

She rocks against him, her skin gliding over his, hair brushing his chest and jaw, breast dragging, just the tips against his chest.

If you’d asked him about it, just when he and Rey were starting up, or, at least, when he was beginning to think that their relationship might at some point involve actual physical sex, what he expected, _this_ would have never have even crossed his mind.

Gentleness. Not just that he’s capable of it (though that surprises him, too) but that he _loves_ it. That being softly stroked and petted and loved on lights him up inside. That the touch of his hand, light and soft, skin to skin, or tongue, or shaft, or any of him, just gliding against her makes him feel _good_ , in his heart and head and body.

During that half-hour long conversation where Luke talked about ‘physically communing together in mutual accord and affection,’ and how it wasn’t forbidden, and was, for Masters, secure in their devotion to the light, encouraged as a way to gain knowledge of themselves, each other, and another layer of the light, Kylo-who-was-Ben could tell that A: Luke had no idea what he was talking about. He’d never _communed_ so this was a purely theoretical conversation on his part, and B: Kylo-who-was-in-the- walking-erection stage of life was sure that calm and serene sex was more or less fiction. Calm and serene didn’t come into play when he was touching himself, and he couldn’t imagine it coming into play touching someone else.

Luke didn’t have the feel of it to add to the power of his words, and Kylo couldn’t imagine it.

He can now. And, better, he doesn’t have to _imagine_ it.

He never expected that. None of his previous experiences had ever even attempted anything like that. And he’s not sure if he could have let himself enjoy it before, even if one of his companions had tried to be gentle with him, but now that he can…

 

 

He’d lay here for hours, happily rocking with her, soft fluid motions, slowly building each other up.

Fast and hard will come, eventually. He’s not sure he can finish without that, but getting there… Especially when she’s lying on him, head tucked under his chin, both of them barely moving, just breathing together and _feeling,_ it makes him happy in a way he never thought himself capable of _._

She’s holding his hand right now, and he’s got his senses on it, feeling her fingers between his, and how _tiny_ she is next to him. One of his fingers makes up almost two of hers. Her hands are rougher than his. She doesn’t wear gloves every day. He can feel callouses from years of work, and a few jagged nails that got caught on something recently. He lets his fingers slip between hers, mirroring the soft, easy motions of their hips, and feels her skin still sliding against his. Different, rougher, drier, not sexual, but real and here and now and lighting him up.

He can feel her breath against his sternum, and her hair on his chin, and the soft weight of her on top of him, and it’s freeing and anchoring all at once. It’s a space he never thought he’d get to inhabit, a thing he needed but never knew to want.

There are things he wants to say to her, words that feel frozen, not just on his lips, but in his head, so he traces them across her skin, and kisses them to her shoulders, and runs them through her hair with his fingers, and maybe, with enough of these soft, light touches, his words will unfreeze, and maybe, one day, he’ll say them.

She doesn’t tell him he’s thinking loudly, though he knows she can feel the words that won’t form, and how he’s trying to touch them to her, how he’s trying to let them sink directly into her skin, and pass from whatever soul or life or light he has to hers.

He feels them back, in the softness of her hand on his shoulder, and the glide of her lips against his throat. Feels them in her skin as she begins to move a little faster, and her thighs as they wrap around him.

 _Love you._ It breaks out of him as they begin to move faster, as he slips from her embrace to thrust back into it, harder, deeper, urgent. _Love you._ It pours out of him, cracking through old, armored plates flaking off of his skin. _Love you._ It rises up to meet him, her mind joining his. _Love you._ It shudders through both of them as they cling to each other, bodies slick and pulsing. _Love you._ It gets soft, and quiet, exhaled between one sets of lips and kissed back to the other.

_Love you._

 

 

* * *

“There’s no lock,” Kylo says.

He’d been three quarters asleep, snuggled up behind her, arm wrapped around her, drowsing, in an extremely good mood, very pleased at how comfortable her bed is, feeling the brush of her breath against his wrist when the thing he didn’t do jolts through him.

The first thing he does every night, when he shuts the door to his chambers behind him, is secure the lock.

His eyes go jolting open, and he’s standing before he’s even given it any real thought. There’s no lock on the door to her bedroom, and he opens the door, looking through the cottage. There’s no lock on any of the doors.

“Come back to bed,” she’s basically asleep, and can’t understand what he’s talking about. “Morning.”

Kylo does go back to bed, but he’s tense. He’s not a great sleeper at the best of times, and… It’s stupid. He knows it’s stupid. They are literally the only two people on the planet. But someone could come. Chewie doesn’t exactly call ahead of time, and right now he and Finn and Rose could just walk right in, and… And there may be animals, she’s found some really big tracks, and…

He’s lying there, tense, staring at the ceiling of Rey’s cottage.

He feels like he’s been doing it for hours, though it’s likely only been a few minutes. Then he’s up. He pulls on his pants, grabs his saber, and goes to her chapel to meditate. That’s normally how he deals with the nights when sleep won’t find him.

Inside the chapel isn’t much different from outside the chapel. Not on a night like tonight. The dome is fused trans-steel. It’s clear as air, a thousand times lighter than glass, and a million times stronger. He’s got a view of the night, stars scattered across the sky, only one moon visible right now.

He kneels. The river rocks are smooth and round and hard under his knees and the balls of his feet. Not the most comfortable place he’s ever done this.

On several levels.

The night isn’t exactly quiet. There’s some sort of creature making a lot of little noises, and there’s a bit of a wind moving across the plain, rustling the billion blades of grass. The _Supremacy_ isn’t ever silent, either, but it makes the kind of noises he’s used to, mechanical ones. The rumble of the engines, the vibration of a billion plus tons of steel and electronics shifting through space.

Out here it’s the chirp of some sort of animal and the rustle of grass and the susurrus of wind…

And the last time he lived somewhere with things like grass and animals he learned, the hard way, that he always needed a door that locked. And a lock that couldn’t be slipped silently.

There’s not a lock devised that a well-trained Force user can’t slip. All the codes, all of the electronics, all of it just exists to make sure that a piece of metal latches into another piece of metal, and if you can shift that with your mind, the rest of it doesn’t matter.

So, for Kylo, a lock isn’t there to bar an intruder. It’s there to give him warning. It’s a ward, not a wall.

The next time someone tries to creep up on him in the middle of the night, he’s going to be waiting, blade extended. The next set of eyes peering at him with hate and rage in the dim night will be seen through a red glow.

Thinking on that is not helping to settle his mind.

Of course, his traditional meditations were never designed to settle his mind, either. They were there to give him strength, power, _rage._

Cataloging every sin ever pressed against him was a mantra. It wasn’t exactly calming, but it was _focusing._

Whose sins are left?

Only his mother.

Everyone else, every other slight that mattered, every ounce of real pain or anguish… They’re all gone.

And most of them are dead by his own hand.

He can feel the darkness in him, clamoring for a fight, looking for _something_ to get angry at. He could go yell at Rey for not having a lock. He can _feel_ it. It’s burning in him, the desire to kick at her just to _kick._ He’s breathing a little faster at the idea. She’d _kick_ back, and hard.

And he’d _deserve_ it.

Whipped and beaten for being _dark._

Shunned for his nature.

Marked for his transgressions. More scars, more sins to recount in the middle of the night.

The token is around her neck, but he’s sitting in the middle of a much bigger mark, dark gray and light gray swirling into each other, and he can feel the dark, feel it surging through him, feel it seeking to overbalance anything and everything else.

It’d be so sweet. He could just sink into it, rage, let it all out, and she’d punish him for it, send him reeling away, and he’d sink back into black, and she’d raise to white, both of them going hard and rigid and…

And hate is power. Hate is armor. Hate means no fear, even if he can’t sleep in a room without a lock on the fucking door.

And that’s where it cracks.

Kylo Ren, Supreme Leader, soon to be Master of The Order, the most powerful man in the galaxy, the man who destroyed every one of his enemies, save the one who gave birth to him, cannot sleep in a room without a lock on the door.

Because hate doesn’t banish fear, it just masks it. He took the mask off his face. Time to take it off his feelings.

He returns to Rey, quietly, not exactly calm or steady.

She’s sleeping, curled into a little ball, calm, steady, easy breathing. His presence doesn’t cause her to stir.

Bad things happened to her in the night. From the flashes of it he’s seen/felt, _worse_ things happened to her in the night. That didn’t cripple her ability to rest near people.

Then he looks around. They’re the only people on this planet. She exiled herself, maybe with good reason, hiding is important, getting this started without anyone trying to kill it matters, but… besides the few months with Orlac, (He rolls his eyes at that, he should have known _that’s_ where they’d send her. Never let anything outside the family, if they can avoid it.) she’s never lived anywhere with people.

She doesn’t lock the door because she made sure no one else could come.

He lays down next to her, scooting in close, and shifts them back to his room.

Maybe, one day, he’ll sleep in an open room, but not yet.

 

 

* * *

It is known that when the Supreme Leader retires for the night that he is _not_ to be disturbed for anything less than a full scale attack.

There are rumors that the Supreme Leader _cannot_ be disturbed once he retires. The man who designed the lock on the door to his private chambers would, of course, never speak of it, but… he’s not the only one who’s ever seen the lock.

There are no sensors, no keypad, no… anything. It’s a sheer expanse of black, identical to his wall. Those who know how to use it know which parts of his door to press in which order to get access. Unlocking it properly requires hitting the door at least four times, in exactly the right place, in exactly the right sequence, with the right count between hits. Doing it with the Force results in a loud clacking sound.

It’s not an unbreakable lock, but there’s no way to sneak around it.


	10. Maji

1/12/36 ABY: Lirium

 

“You found eight of them?” Rey asks Poe, eyes wide, as eight children, ranging from just out of toddlerhood to gangly adolescent, and six… things… come galumphing out of the cargo ship he just landed near her… town.

He keeps his voice low. “No. I found one of them. Remember, I told you about how I had someone you needed to meet?”

She nods, remembering that from the wedding. That was the last time she talked to Poe. He was heading back to Canto Bight, looking for more funding, more ships, more people.

“That one,” he points to a boy of nine or ten, “Marrok, he’s the one I wanted you to meet.”

She nods at that, too, she can feel his spark of the Force, recognizing it easily.

“Here’s why I’ve got him and his seven best buddies, and their six faviers: The First Order has recruiting stations up all over Canto Bight. The Powers That Be don’t like that. They’ve got slaves galore, and they’re running away in droves, but they got to be the Powers That Be by selling weapons, and there’s exactly one guy in the galaxy who’s still buying them in bulk, and they want to keep him happy, so they won’t ban his ‘recruiting stations.’” He nods to the kids. “None of them like the First Order, but no matter how bad the First Order is, it’s five years and they’re done. Their owners on Canto Bight aren’t offering that sort of deal. And it’s not exactly like we’ve got recruiting stations for them to run to. They’d gotten a plan to get away, slip the slave catchers, and get to a First Order recruiting station, but it took all eight of them. If I took just Marrok, he’d end up leaving them in the lurch, so I either had to grab them all, or they were all going to join the First Order.”

Rey sighs. She understands that sort of logic, but… “What am I going to do with eight kids and…” She looks at the huge things grazing between the cleared off places where she intends to put some more cottages. “What are those?”

“Faviers. They wouldn’t go without them, too.”

“Great. What are they, pets?”

“Racing animals. I’d bet they’ll pull a cart if you hook one up to them.” Though he doesn’t exactly look like he expects to _win_ that bet if he made it.

“There’s something, I guess.” She watches the kids exploring. “Did you bring food for them? I’ve got enough for me, but…” In the sense that she eats at least one meal a day from the _Supremacy’s_ kitchens, she’s got enough food for herself to last a week or so. Chewie makes sure to show up at least that often, but she’s not exactly equipped to feed an additional eight people for a day, much less the three or four days between now and Chewie getting here.

“I’ve got food, and medical supplies, and some clothing.” He looks at her feet. “You need new boots.”

“I can get myself boots,” she says it before she’s even really thought about it, but Poe’s looking at her like she’s half-crazy.

“From where?” He looks around at endless grass plains, and waves toward a gentle roll in the grass. “A market open up over the next hill that I don’t know about?”

“Chewie and Finn and Rose should be here in a few days…” She covers. And, as she thinks about it, she’s going to have to ask them for some boots, because if she starts wearing a pair of First Order standard work boots, Finn will recognize them.

She looks out at the kids, who are racing around, and the faviers, who are exploring, all fourteen of them looking like they’ve never seen so much space. “What am I going to do with them?”

Poe shrugs. “What were you going to do with the Force sensitive one?”

“I…” It’s one thing to say you’re going to teach the Force and balance and all the rest of it. It’s another thing entirely to do it. “I guess, for right now, we’re going to build. You think they can help?”

“They all had jobs. It’s not like they were just laying around and I kidnapped them. At the very least, they know how to take care of the faviers.”

Rey sighs, feeling a little overwhelmed. “That’s a start. Well, introduce me.”

 

 

* * *

There were children on Niima Outpost, just not a lot of them. Sometimes a trader would come through with a family. But most of the people who lived at Niima Outpost just couldn’t afford them. And most women likely didn’t get enough to eat or enough rest to carry to term. On top of that, Rey didn’t spend much time with them, either. Not when she was a child, or as an adult.

So, standing here, in front of eight of them, all of them looking up at her, skeptical vibes coming off of all of them, because… Okay, Poe’s a good guy and all, but… really… who feeds you just for going to a place to _learn?_

“This is…” And Poe runs headfirst into the idea that he’s got no idea what title Rey wants.

“Rey. Just Rey.”

“This is Rey. And she’s building a town here for people to learn how to be Jedi,” Poe says. He’s got the basic idea of what she’s doing but apparently missed a lot of the details. “Rey, this is Rugh,” he points out the youngest of the children, a little girl of… maybe four years old. She’s right next to, “Halee, her older brother,” who’s likely nine or ten. With them is the boy who can use the force, “Marrok, and his cousin,” another boy with sandy hair and greenish eyes, this one is older, twelve? “Blane. Over there we’ve got Magiit,” the oldest of the group, a girl just starting her teens, she’s holding the hand of a little boy, “Colin,” he’s just a bit older than Rugh. “And the twins, Opal and Torine,” who both appear to be about eight-years-old.

The idea of Jedi training has resulted in some _very_ excited children. Eight little guys light up like a saber extended in the dark. And a skeptical Rey, because, at the very best she could teach _one_ of them to be a Jedi, and she’s got seven others that will never, no matter what, ever, be Jedi. Plus, even if it was just Marrok, she wouldn’t be going to teach him how to be a Jedi, either.

“We’re going to learn to be Jedi?” Opal is very excited by this idea, speaking with her voice high and words fast, and two of the others are pretending to levitate rocks, and another three are having a mock lightsaber battle.

“No, Opal. You’re not learning to be a Jedi,” Rey says.

All eight of them are disappointed by that. Of course Poe’s spiel was too good to be true. They’re glaring at him. Even the faviers seem disappointed by that. Their ears droop a little when she says it.

Rey stands up, and spins her staff in a defensive arc, extending the blade as she does it, all of them gasp at the red haloed blue blade. “I’m not a Jedi, so I can’t teach you to be one. But… I can teach you about the Force, and why I’m not a Jedi, and eventually, you’ll learn enough to plan your own path. Maybe one of you will chose to be a Jedi, but, maybe not.”

She figures that’s broad enough to include all of them, and… In a flash she gets it. They all _need_ to be here. The galaxy isn’t all made up of just Force users, and anything she comes up with has to be valuable for non-Force users as well as Force users, otherwise she’s just throwing the balance off.

The galaxy isn’t just light and dark. It’s not just about people who can use their will to float rocks.

The balance is for _everyone._

She can see the kids like the lightstaff. She can feel eight little sprogs who all want one. And, it’s occurring to her that Finn could use a lightsaber almost as well as she could, so there’s no reason, other than her current complete and utter lack of kyber crystals, that all of them couldn’t build their own sabers or staffs or… whatever, eventually.

“Okay, all of you, sit down, get comfortable, close your eyes, and feel…”

They do as well as they can. She knows only one of them is really _feeling_ it, but it seems like a good idea for the other seven to get the idea of this being how everything works.

“Grass below you, sky above. Warm suns, cool dirt… The wet of the lake on the wind… Feel it?”

“Is that the Force?” Magiit, the oldest of them, asks.

“No. It’s… how you know the Force. You know the Force by what you feel. And all around you, at all times, there’s everything. All of this life and light and death and dark. Hot and cold, solid and fluid. Just close your eyes and feel what’s there…”

She gives them two minutes. That’s as long as the littlest and squirmiest of the kids can go.

“It’s all in balance. You feel that? Everything has a counterpart, somewhere. Maybe you only see the suns right now, but you know night is coming. And it’s warm here, but if you go north or south, you’ll find the cold. There’s a light for each dark.”

“That’s the Force?” Halee, a boy about nine, asks.

“The Force is what balances everything. It’s the energy and the tension, the web… that allows everything to exist and move.” She holds out her hand, above her head, and places the staff on her extended index finger. It wobbles a bit, and she’s got to move it a little, but she finds the balance point. “That’s the Force. That’s what balances everything and lets our universe spin. Take that balance away, and instead of perfect spin, it’ll fly apart.” She gives her staff a little spin, and over her head, on the balance point, it spins just fine. Then she moves the staff, so it’s off-balance, and not only can’t it spin, it can’t stay on her finger, and falls off, bonking her on the head on the way down.

“Ow!” she rubs her head and the kids laugh as she calls the staff back to her hand.

“The Jedi use the Force!” Marrok adds.

“Yes. They did. But they weren’t the only ones.”

“How can you use a balance?” Blane asks.

“If you can find the balance point, you can move anything, do anything,” Rey says.

“All of us?” Halee’s asking.

“All of you, in one way or another. Not everyone can float rocks, but everyone can find their destiny and make it happen. Maybe I can float a rock. Maybe you can pick it up. Maybe one of you can build a lever. Maybe one of you gets the faviers to move the rock. Maybe one of you can organize everyone into a rock moving team. But we can all move the rock.”

“Why aren’t we going to be Jedi?” Marrok, the only one of them who could be a Jedi asks.

She lights the staff again, and again balances it on her finger. “Light side,” she points to the glowing flame. “Dark side,” she points to the other end. Then she starts floating little rocks to the light side along with a few big ones, resting them on the handle of what used to be a lightsaber. “The Jedi were dedicated to the light. So dedicated they sought to banish every trace of darkness.” More rocks, and the staff is tipping, rocks are falling off, her blade singeing the grass. “But the Force seeks balance.” She stabilizes the staff, and floats a big rock over to the dark side, to balance the little rocks on the light.

“Kylo Ren!” Marrok says.

“Before him. Emperor Palpatine.” She adds one more, smaller, but still big rock, to the dark side. “Darth Vader.” She knocks most of the little light side rocks off, and eventually, there are just two. “Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda.” Right now, the staff balances.

“The dark side rocks got heavier, but the Force seeks balance.” She adds another rock to the light side. “Luke Skywalker.” She lets her staff tip a bit to the light. Then she knocks another rock off. “Seeking balance, Kenobi falls, and Luke grows stronger, and out there, unknown to her, another almost Jedi rises.” She adds a pebble to the light side. “General Organa.”

“General Organa’s a JEDI!” That gets a very excited squeak and a wave of excitement.

“No. She isn’t and never was. But she’s part of the Force seeking balance. We all are. And maybe, someday, she’ll come here and talk to you about the Force, and not being a Jedi. But the dark side was getting stronger, and the Force seeks balance.”

She knocks another rock off the light side. “Yoda falls, and Luke grows stronger.”

“Too much weight on the dark side,” Torine says.

“I know, and what happened?”

“Luke Skywalker killed Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader!” a tiny voice chirps. Rugh’s staring at the staff with big eyes, and a very excited air about her.

Rey knocks both rocks off the dark side. “Now what? The staff can’t fall, the Force won’t let it.”

“Snoke!” Opal says.

She nods, putting a big rock on the dark side. “And what does Luke do after the war?”

“More Jedi!” Marrok says.

She nods again, and starts to levitate more rocks onto the light side.

“Kylo Ren!” Blane says.

She nods, adding Kylo to the dark side. And then she wipes Luke’s Jedi off the light side. “Now what?”

“You?” Rugh asks.

She nods.

“And you killed Snoke! And Kylo Ren killed Luke and now you’re the only two left and—“ Marrok is saying, voice high and excited.

“Hush, child. I didn’t kill Snoke. Kylo did.”

Sixteen _huge_ eyes are staring up at her. And one set of equally huge eyes are looking across at her. Poe’s never heard this version of the story, either.

“And Kylo didn’t kill Luke. Luke sacrificed himself, gave himself up to the Force, so what was left of the Resistance could escape.”

She knocks all but two of the stones off of the staff.

“Now, what happens if I train new Jedi? If we go off and dedicate ourselves to the light and nothing but the light?”

“The Force raises new Darklings.” Halee says.

Rey smiles; she likes ‘Darklings,’ and is privately thinking she might, at some point, if she could keep it in her own mind, call Kylo that. “Exactly.”

“So… we don’t ever learn to use the Force?” Marrok sounds disappointed.

“No. We learn that the Force is the balance. And we learn that we are, all of us, dark and light, and we learn to use both sides of our nature to do what we were born to do.”

“If we aren’t Jedi… What are we?” Marrok asks.

It’s out of her mouth before she can think of it, “Maji. We are the Maji, and we are the protectors of the balance.”

“But… if we learn to be Maji, and if Kylo Ren is still out there… doesn’t that mean there has to be a Jedi somewhere to balance him?” Magiit says.

That one is smarter than she expected.

“I balance him, and he balances me, and you… you balance yourselves. We’re the last of the old generation, and you’re the first of a new one.”

“How do we do that?” Opal asks.

Rey gives them a lopsided smile. “I’m not entirely sure, but we’re going to find out. First things first, let’s get you guys settled in.” 

 

 

* * *

Poe finds her later, in her cottage, after they’ve set up two more huts, (between Rey having more practice at it now, and several extra sets of hands, it’s a much faster operation than when she was doing it for herself) and the children have gone out to fish in the lake. Poe brought food, but if they can supplement that with fresh meat, it’ll last a lot longer.

“Ren killed Snoke?”

She nods.

He’s staring at her, very intently. That’s not the story he heard. Though, as he thinks about it, that’s a story she’s also never _told._ She was content to let them think whatever they wanted to. “What happened?”

She’s at her workbench, where she’s working on setting up a control panel for one of the cottages. “I thought I could turn Kylo back to Ben—“ This would be when Rey realizes that who Kylo Ren was isn’t common knowledge among the Resistance, either.

He’s staring at her, looking like he’s at least twenty chapters behind her in the story. “Ben? Ben what? Who’s Ben?”

“Solo,” she says, voice low. Poe’s eyes just about fall out of his head as he digests that. “Solo… Like… Leia Organa-Solo…” he whispers it.

Rey nods. “Yeah.”

“Leia’s _son_? We all thought he was dead.” Poe looks gut punched.

He sits at one of the benches at her table, and glances to the bottles on her shelf. “Tell me you’ve got something stronger than water to drink.”

She winces a little. “I do, but…”

“I don’t care if it’s rocket fuel, pour me one and leave the bottle.”

So Rey does, and he knocks the first shot of it back like it’s nothing and pours himself another. “Where’d you get Andorrann Plum Brandy?” Then he shakes his head. “I’m distracting myself. _Kylo Ren is Leia’s son_?”

“Yes.”

“We’ve been at war with her little boy?”

“If you can call what we’ve been doing since he killed Snoke, war, sure.”

He’s staring into his drink. “Leia’s son. How does Leia’s son go _that_ wrong? I think that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” This time he takes a sip, rather than shooting the brandy back. “Really? Leia’s son?”

She’s nodding. “Luke Skywalker’s nephew. I tried to turn him back to the light side. He tried to turn me to the dark. Snoke and the entire Praetorian guard died in the process.”

His mind is whirling, and he’s trying to speak, but he doesn’t know what to say. Finally… “When did this happen?” comes out.

“While you were evacuating to Crait.”

“What? We’re… And you’re… And… _How_?”

Rey half shrugs. Looking at it through Poe’s eyes, it does sound like an utterly inconceivable story. “It seemed like a good plan at the time.”

He goggles at her.

“I’d been with Luke, and… He’s his nephew. And when he was young, he went to train as a Jedi with Luke. It didn’t work out, but… I was sure I could… But I couldn’t. And, by the time it was done… I could feel it, he can’t be turned. I can’t, either. I mean… no, it’s not physically impossible, but if either of us turns, a new one will just pop up to balance the Force again.

“As long as it’s just the two of us, and as long as I don’t load up the light side with these little guys, things will stay… stable.”

“And if there’s some monster rising in the Unknown Regions?” Poe says.

“If I’m right about how it works, there won’t be. Unless I go dark, in which case the monster will be another Luke, or Kylo goes light, in which case, anticipate a new Snoke.”

Poe’s lip curls in disgust. “So… we have to just… leave him there?”

Rey shrugs, trying to look impassive about this. “Leave him there, or roll the dice and hope the next one is as interested in not running the galaxy into the ground as Kylo is. I… He’s not doing a terrible job. You know it. When was the last time you found an actual recruit for us?”

Poe glares at her. He’s been coming up dry again and again.  It’s been almost a year without a real attack, and most the people he runs into just want to get on with their lives. And the ones who don’t are generally more trouble than they’re worth. “You’d think after he—“

“Snoke.”

“It’s all the same, Rey. Anyone wearing that mark is responsible.”

“Like Finn? Is he responsible for anything that the First Order did before he turned? He was at the massacre of Tuanal and didn’t stop it.”

He knows she knows how he feels about Finn. How, given that Finn is not only married now, but about to be a father, he’s trying very hard _not_ to feel about Finn. “That’s a low blow.”

She shakes her head at him. “No, it’s not. Kylo didn’t give the order to take out the Hosnian system.”

“He didn’t stop it.”

“He killed the man who gave the order, and the one who put him in power to do it.”

“After they did it…” Poe’s eyes jerk up to Rey’s. “Wait… Ren killed Hux? That was… months… after Crait. How do you even know this?”

She sort of rolls her eyes, and tries to feel about it the way she did when the bond between them was new. “I just do. The Force… I’m not kidding about the balance thing. I know… Stuff I shouldn’t.”

“Oh.” Then he looks horrified. If she knows… “Does that mean…”

“It’s part of the reason I’ve been staying away from planning meetings and the like. I mean… I know… I can feel, he’s not interested in the Resistance any longer, but, better safe out here, than all of us being sorry, right?”

He nods slowly. “Should I stay away?”

“Poe,” she gently touches his hand, “you’re so far down on his list of concerns. You can dance naked here, shouting ‘I’m Poe Dameron, Second in Command of the Resistance, Destroyer of the _Fulminatrix_ , The Man Who Led The Attack On Starkiller, come and get me!’ and I don’t think he’d even blink, let alone send a ship for you.”

Poe slumps at that. “That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard. Years. Decades. I took out a dreadnaught. I ran the attack that took out Starkiller. I--”

“Lost the war. We all did. He’s moving on. The question is, are we?”

He stares into his drink, shaking his head.

“Poe… No bravado, no hopeful lies, no… talking for the recruits, how bad is it?”

He sighs and rubs his forehead. “A corpse on life support, too damn stubborn to die, too damaged to live.”

“What kind of people are you getting?”

His teeth grit. “Psychopaths. People with a hard-on for vengeance. People who don’t care if they die as long as they hurt as many guys in a First Order uniform as possible before they go. People like I used to be, too damn stupid to back away from a fight if winning it’ll hurt worse than retreating.

“There used to be _reasonable_ people willing to join us, but between the slave thing and the fact that he’s shifted his weapons platform from bigger, badder, and harder to smaller, more maneuverable, and well-tested, most of the kind of people we used to recruit from freely are gone. Instead of the First Order rolling in, kidnapping the entire local population, tossing them in chains, working them to death, and then using whatever’s left of the planet to test its weapons on, his people show up, set up ‘Recruiting stations’ promise everyone who does five years a pile of goodies, and then ships them off to wherever they’re going. He’s not ripping babies away from their families anymore. His new weapons…” Poe sighs, staring at the ceiling of Rey’s cottage, frustration bleeding off of him. “New’s the wrong word. It’s tested technology. And it’s _fucking_ terrifying. Did you see the battering ram cannon?”

“Heard about it, saw it on the ground for a second, but I didn’t see it fire.”

“Miniaturized Death Star tech.” He shoots back more of the drink. Dealing with this, trying to come up with tactics for it has been haunting him, Leia, too. It’s not just they don’t have enough of anything, it’s that they don’t have anything _good_ to do with what they have. “They’re designed to kill hardened targets, or to do things like take mountains out of the way. On the ground, they’re a mess. You only bring them in if you’ve got to flatten something the size of a cliff because they’re huge and have the maneuverability of an asteroid field. He’s got three manufacturers stuffing them into ships the size of a small bomber. In orbit, it doesn’t matter how big or heavy the thing is because gravity and air resistance aren’t issues anymore. One hit’ll take out a decent sized town, and any ship smaller than a mega-dreadnaught, and he’s flying the only one of them in existence. He’s building thousands of them per dreadnaught.” Poe pours another drink.

“I can’t fight that. Not… without an equal, if not greater, number of pilots. Anything with them is dogfighting, and I can train the best fucking dogfighters you’ve ever seen, but… he can, too. And he’s got the money to pay ‘em and the ships to train ‘em in.

“You can do a suicide run to take out a dreadnaught. Maybe it’s stupid, but you can do it. You can’t do that here. For every one of them I take out, he can take out one of mine and…”

“And you don’t have the people.”

The look on Poe’s face is heartbreaking. “I don’t. Just to break even, I’ve got to take out something like ninety of his for every one of mine. And I don’t have the recruits to get to the point where I can even take a shot at him. I can train a fish to fly, if the fish loves flying. I can’t train a person to fly, if the only reason that person wants to fly is because he’s living on hate.”

“So…”

He rubs his temples. She can feel he doesn’t want to be saying any of this, but it’s also a relief to be able to finally say it to someone. “Captain… Admiral. I’m officially Admiral Dameron now, goes down with the ship. As long as we’re fighting, I’m in. I’ll scramble around, play a lot of sabbac, win us money and ships, and…”

“Waste your time.”

“Don’t say that.” He looks so hurt at that idea.

“Am I wrong?”

“Just… don’t.”

Rey can feel this conversation, this moment, them in her cottage is happening for a reason, and before she knows what that reason is, “How did you know Marrok was Force sensitive?” has fallen out of her mouth.

“Mmm?” He didn’t follow how her thought got there, and honestly, she’s not entirely sure, either.

“You knew he had talent. How?”

“Uh…” Poe rubs his eyes, trying to remember. “Um… Gambling. I support myself gambling and the occasional ‘cargo’ run. The faviers race, and betting on them is big in Canto Bight. I got one of the high muckety-mucks to invite me to the stables, and noticed the kids. I’m always on the lookout for kids like them, they’ve usually got families, and… that’s generally where the good recruits are.”

“But these children are orphans.”

“Or if they aren’t, their parents are gone. Something about him… I don’t know what I saw, but I kept looking and… Eventually, he flashed me the Resistance sign, and we got talking about what I was doing, and how they could help, and…”

“So, he found you?”

“We found each other.”

“Could you do it again?”

Poe doesn’t immediately understand that. But Rey does. She’s seeing a part of the plan she hadn’t before, something she absolutely has to have to make this work.

“If I’m teaching them here, I can’t leave. I can’t be out scouting the galaxy looking for little Force users while teaching the ones I’ve got.” She touches the token on her chest. “You gave this to me. You’ve got a feel for it, and I _need_ someone who can travel and has that feel.”

“You want me to recruit for you?”

“Yes. Help me bring life to something new, instead of clinging to something that’s dying.” She touches the token again. “The Force is in and through and with, _everything._ That’s… another place where I think the Jedi went wrong, they sequestered the ideas of light and dark to only those who could ‘use the Force.’ But, we’re all using it, all the time. Maybe I can do flashier things with it. Luke called them tricks. Okay, I can do some spiffy tricks. And maybe you can’t, though I’ve heard about how you fly, so it wouldn’t shock me if you’re not pulling from the Force, somehow, maybe not the way I do, but… somehow.

“But we’re not Jedi, we’re Maji. You and—“ she almost says Kylo, but Poe’s buzzed enough he doesn’t notice her trip over her word and say, “me. And those children. And anyone else who wants to be part of the balance.”

“Give up the Resistance?” his voice catches on that. He’s been Resisting since he was fifteen.

“I don’t think recruiting for me and the Resistance are mutually exclusive conditions. I think you can do both. Do the one and keep an eye out for the other. I just think one of those two options is going to continue long into the future, and the other is, as you said, dying.”

They hear a commotion outside, followed by voices growing distinct, “Rey, Rey! Look!” Her door slides open and the kids are crowding around, holding a massive, thrashing fish. “This is a fish, right?”

It’s almost as big as Rugh. “That’s a fish.” She looks over to Poe. “Think about it. Okay you guys, lesson one, how to clean a fish. I have a friend, and you’ll get to meet him soon, named Chewbacca, and Chewbacca’s a great cook. I’m not as good, but he taught me how to cook a fish, and I’ll show you. Let’s go get this thing close to the lake again.”

“Why?” Blane asks.

“Because we’re going to cut its head off, and take its guts out, and if we toss that back into the lake, some of the other creatures will eat it. We don’t waste food here. If you don’t like it, compost it, give it to someone who does, or the animals.”

 

 

* * *

It takes longer to get the fish cleaned, and cooked, and portioned out, and fed to the children than Rey was expecting. When Chewie does it, it takes about three minutes. He just _does_ it, and suddenly all the bones are gone and he’s got a lovely fish steak.

She and the kids spend what feels like hours pulling bones out of this thing, and at the end of it, they’ve got a collection of fairly ragged and shaggy looking fish parts.

But they’re edible.

And the kids do seem to like running around looking for brush to build a fire with. They like cooking the fish over the fire more.

And they’re… not entirely enthusiastic about eating it, but they’re hungry, and it’s food, and it rounds out the portions that Poe brought along.

And while they do that, Rey doesn’t see Poe. He’s… off… thinking maybe. Drinking maybe. As the blue sun starts to sink low, she sees him on the bank of the lake, looking for something. She doesn’t know what he picks up, but he grabs, something, from the stones of the lake, and heads back into her cottage.

They all hear him shout out, “FUCK!” several moments later, but he doesn’t come out, and Rey can sense that he’s startled but okay.

As green sun is sinking, it’s getting fairly close to when she’d go to Kylo, or he would come to her. She flashes him the sense that she’s got people around, and gets a sense back of waiting. Impatient waiting, but resigned impatience.

She sends him a little smile, and the feel of the night a few days earlier, when he was up late with his generals talking recruitment targets.

She feels his answering smirk.

The children are milling around the bank of the lake, and Rey’s not entirely sure what to do with them. “What do you normally do after dinner?”

“Feed the Faviers, rub them down, make sure they’re settled,” Magiit, says.

“Okay, go take care of them. When Chewie gets back, we’ll make up a list of what we need to keep them happy.”

“They’re happy,” Opal says. “It’s been a long time since they’ve had grass under their paws, and they’ve missed it.”

“Good. I’m going to go talk to Master Poe, and then I’m turning in. Tomorrow, we start working on the piping.”

Torine says, “Is that it?”

Rey looks a little concerned. “Should there be more?”

“We can do what we like between now and the morning?”

Rey nods. “I’d suggest sleeping, but… Sure. Pick which of the huts you want, unpack whatever you brought, and then rest. Attaching the plumbing on the huts to the lake is hard work.”

“What kind of hard work?” Blane asks.

“Digging, moving rocks, laying pipes. We’re going to be sweating tomorrow.”

The kids don’t exactly look enthusiastic, but… It’s not grooming Faviers and being treated like dung by the people who bet on them.

 

 

* * *

When she gets into her cottage, she sees Poe at her work bench. His finger is bandaged, so she’s guessing that’s what got the loud cursing.

He’s using her fine cutting laser and has one of the lake rocks, a small one, about the size of the token. It’s streaked with light and dark gray, and he’s carved the swirl from her token into it.

He doesn’t look away as he says, “I should know better than to try things like this drunk.”

She nods. “Finger still in one piece?”

“Enough. It’ll heal.” It wiggles the way it’s supposed to when he holds his hand to up her and flexes his finger. Then he returns to the stone. He finishes drilling a hole into the top of it. “Got a string or something?”

Rey nods. “I do.” She roots around in the drawers of her workbench and finds a spool of leather cord. It only takes her a minute to get the stone threaded, and one more to get it knotted.

She loops it over Poe’s head. “Poe Dameron of the Maji.”

He rolls his eyes a little, and then says, “I should go sleep this off. It may seem like a stupid idea sober.”

“I won’t hold you to it if seems that way in the morning.”

He staggers out to his ship, and Rey closes up behind him, tidies up her work bench, and then shifts herself through to Kylo.

 

 

* * *

“I found our name,” she says to Kylo later that night.

He kisses her shoulder. These moments, when they’re lying in his bed or hers, spooning, talking quietly, they’re… almost (he’s more than a bit fond of what they were doing before lying quietly) the highlight of his day.

“What is it?”

“Maji.”

He kisses her shoulder again, snuggling closer. “Rey of Jakku, First Mistress of the Maji.”

“Not Rey of Jakku. Just Rey. Rey of the Maji.”

He touches the token that’s around her neck today. “Am I Kylo of the Maji?”

She rolls over to face him, nodding. “Kylo of the Maji.”

He smiles a little. “I like that.” He touches the token again, and she slips it from her neck to his. His fingers land on the token, warm from her skin. “Will I wear it openly, one day?”

“I hope so. If I teach balance, then anyone. Even you, even me, can be a Maji.”

 

 

* * *

Slowly, one conversation at a time, most of them started by a glib-tongued pilot, pretending to be just a traveler, seeking to take cargo from one port to the next, the word Maji begins to spread.

And slowly, the population of Lirium begins to grow.


	11. Lessons

1/15/36

 

If you were to ask Rey what she was working on, and building, and gathering together, and studying for, she’d tell you about reimagining how the Force works, and she’d get that bright and excited look in her eyes, explaining how it’s not about dark and light, and it’s not about creating some exclusive enclave of super-powered Force Warriors bound in rigid codes of behavior, pining away for some forgotten and likely fictional past of perfect peace, harmony, and balance, with balance defined as only the light side gets any sway.

On that level, not only can she, but she also will, happily, chatter on long past the point where anyone but Kylo wants to keep listening. (And, in all honestly, he’s really only listening at that point because it’s _Rey_ talking, and would have tuned out hours ago had it been anyone else. He had twelve years of formal Jedi theology lessons, and three years of independent study; that was _more_ than enough according to him.)

She’s got ideas, and yes, some of them are _nebulous_ and some of them she seems to be yanking out of the air based solely on _this feels right_ with a big helping of _and I spent a while studying that, and I_ know _that’s wrong._

So, on the most basic level of _what_ she hopes to teach, she’s been making leaps and bounds and feeling her way around and is on nice, firm, stable territory.

But… See… A school is not only a place where one has ideas. It’s a place where one conveys those ideas, to people, who like people everywhere and through all time, are rather tetchy and have their own opinions of how things are supposed to work and what the nature of reality is, and all of these thorny and sticky bits and bobs of _reality_ that are, on several, levels biting Rey in the tail end.

 

 

* * *

First and foremost, it’s becoming abundantly clear, on the day Poe leaves to go off in search of more Maji, that Rey has never, actually, attended a school.

Now, on the upside, none of the children suddenly in her care have, either, so they at least aren’t comparing her to any previous experiences, but…

She just doesn’t really know what to do with them.

They, on the other hand, are not confused at all about what they want to do. There are eight of them, and between the eight of them they want to do at least twenty things, none of which involves digging channels for pipes to set their cottages up with running water; baths being something none of them are particularly in favor of.

They do want to learn how to use a lightsaber, or barring that, a lightstaff, or for that matter, pretty much any sort of weapon she might be willing to allow them to bonk each other with. Bonking each other with weapons seems to be nine/tenths of what they expect to learn, and they’re not wildly enthusiastic to hear that’s not going to be nine/tenths of the lessons.

Granted, bonking with weapons appears to also be nine/tenths of what they think the Force is useful for and what the Jedi did, so… it’s not an unreasonable expectation.  

Half of them want to get on the Faviers and just ride around. “Scout the terrain,” as Magiit said. (Once they get some homing trackers, Rey’s fine with that, but for right now, she wants them staying within sight of the dome.)

Opal and Torine are watching the sky, hoping Poe will come back soon, because they’re starting to think this was a bad plan. (Lack of weapons to bonk with, too much fish, this strange woman who wants them to dig trenches and think about balance are all taking a toll.) Rey certainly is feeling some sympathy for that.

Rugh wants to help do whatever Rey is doing, which is great, but she’s four, so “helping” often translates into making whatever it is three times more difficult, and in one case, cleaning the mess up means she got less done than if she’d spent the day on the _Supremacy_ , laying around in bed, waiting for Kylo to get done with whatever the hell it is he’s doing today, which the more she thinks about it the better it’s sounding and…

Yeah…

But… This is the job. Develop ideas, convey ideas, make sure little people get those ideas and then are prepared to leave this planet and go off and do things with those ideas.

So…  “Okay, come on. I know you find a lot of this boring, but… We’ve got to have clean water. If your waste ends up in the lake, we all get sick, and none of us want that. We need to get the insides of your cottages set up. We need to stake out a place for the Faviers so they don’t just wander off. All of this has to get done, how do we do it?”

“This doesn’t sound like learning about the Force,” Blane says.

“We’ll do that while we work. Hands and bodies busy, minds calm. I don’t know about you guys, but if I sit still too long, I get antsy.”

They all look around, and it occurs to her that it’s unlikely they’ve ever had enough time, awake, to just sit still to get antsy.

Well, before a deserter came and found her and the droid that befriended her, she never had either, so… She looks around, they’ve got channels to dig and pipes to lay, and that’s likely the most important of the jobs. They’re going to be in a world of hurt, though she’s suspicious that if she can’t use the Force to fix it, that she could likely get medicine from Kylo to help, but… If they get their waste or the Favier’s waste (the real reason they can’t just go roaming around) into the water supply, they are going to get sick.

(She sighs. They’re going to need something to clean the water soon, which means more plumbing, which is, as of this point in time, her least favorite chore, ever.)

“So… Digging. We want the pipes deep enough that they can’t get dug up by something else and they won’t be tripping us up, but shallow enough that if they leak, we’ll see the wet spot, so let’s call that fifteen centimeters.

“We’ve got four cottages for you guys, and mine, and the three that I’ve got set up for when Chewie and Finn and Rose come visit.” Which is two of the cottages. She hopes, though she assumes said visit would be difficult on some levels, that Leia will come, too. But, last she heard, she was still scouring the galaxy for First Order targets they could attack without getting themselves killed. Last she heard was Finn and Rose’s visit, and she doesn’t mind being outside the chain of what’s happening next. That way she doesn’t have to juggle any sense of responsibility to Kylo, or to his mother. “We’ve got the main line of pipe through here.” She gestures to the line that leads between their cottages. “So where do you think we should put this line, and should we just add onto the main line, or start a new one?”

She’s not just asking to ask. She’s curious to see if any of them have learned any of this sort of stuff, or have any kind of mechanical aptitude.

What she learns is that half of them couldn’t care less, and the other half have three very different, very strong, opinions on the matter.

Magiit’s, the best of the lot, is the most work, and the one they likely won’t take. Namely, she’s under the impression that they’re on the wrong bank of the lake, and if they went to the other side, sixteen kilometers away, they’d be at a lower grade than the lake, and they’d have to use less energy to get the water to their cottages, and any waste matter that isn’t properly contained would drain _away_ from the lake. This is both correct and probably useful, but Rey wanted her chapel on the high ground, and her town close to the chapel, so…

“If we ever get enough people here to make it worthwhile, we’ll certainly take that into account. In the meantime,” she looks to Blane, who’s been arguing about how they need to dig a separate line, mostly because if they ever spring a leak, it won’t end up taking out the water for the whole town. “That’s a good idea, too.” Blane smiles at that.

Opal, who along with her twin Torine, ended up working on Canto Bight because they were sold to cover their parents’ debts, looks at the bit of trench that’s already dug. “You sure you want it this close to the surface?”

Torine nods at that. “It got cold once, really cold, back home on Huiit, and the pipes that weren’t deep enough burst.”

“It shouldn’t get that sort of cold here,” Rey says. “This is the equator, so all the seasons should be about the same, maybe a little wetter or drier, or a little cooler or hotter, but it shouldn’t ever get that cold.”

They take Blane’s suggestion, and lay another line. So that means digging a new trench all the way to the lake. In the big scale of things, it’s not that difficult. Any of them can walk the distance in less than two minutes. But digging and walking are not the same thing.

“Come on, let’s get some shovels, and get going.”

 

  

* * *

“Let’s see how it goes.” Rey throws the switch and the pump chugs to life and for a good thirty seconds nothing happens, or everything happens exactly the way it’s supposed to, and then they start seeing little fountains of water shooting through the air at various joints that aren’t _quite_ together.

“We failed!” Torine says.

“Eh…” Rey says, though she’s disappointed, too. “We’re learning.” She turns the pump off and the water begins to drain out. “Every day we’re learning new things, and right now, we’re learning about focus.”

“We failed because we didn’t focus?” Marrok asks.

“Nah, we failed because this is a job that takes time and practice to get right, and it even takes me a few shots to get the solder in right. First time I turned on the water in my shower, it was pouring out of the joints into my wall.

“So, no we didn’t fail because of lack of focus. I want us to think of focus like it’s the pipes. Our minds, our energy, our ability to do things, that’s the water. And most of the time, it wants to go all over the place.” She shrugs a little at that. “At least for me, that’s true. I can have so many ideas all bouncing around in there at once, getting down to just one or two of them can be tricky sometimes.”

They follow her to the first of the leaking joints, and she pulls the pipe up, and begins unthreading it. She hands it to Opal. “We need to make sure it’s dry and really clean. If it’s got dirt or water on it, it won’t seal right, and we’ll just have to do this again.”

Opal starts wiping it. Rey wiggles her fingers at Opal, letting her know to hand it over, and shows her how to do it. Scrubbing grit off a pipe thread, _that’s_ something she knows how to do.  

“Anyway, the pipe is our focus, it’s the way we channel our ideas, and get them going where they belong. Part of what I’m hoping we’re going to learn here is good focus. It’s easier to do anything when you can get all of yourself doing it.”

And, okay, she’s not feeling like a total failure with that. That’s a good save out of water spraying all over her trench and having to pull muddy pipes out of the ground and trying to get them together, right, this time, but…

How do you teach someone to focus?

Of course, she knows someone who went to school, specifically to learn exactly this sort of thing. All she has to do is _ask._

 

 

* * *

Asking about each other’s pasts tends to feel like walking blindfolded through a field seeded with landmines.

They both caught bits of it the first time their minds touched. He, apparently, caught a view of her parents and when they left her. She got his fear of not being Vader. An image, stark and cold, of a younger Kylo, in tattered, singed robes, standing, then kneeling, before Snoke, and feeling his triumph shattering as suddenly the entire map under his feet shifted.

He’d expected to be welcomed as a champion, as the scion of Vader reborn, and what came next was even more of a shock than waking with Luke about to strike him… or not… down. (She wonders if it’s possible for both versions of the story to be true at the same time, and feels that it likely is. She also wonders, more deeply, that if Snoke could get that far into Kylo’s mind, if he wasn’t also pushing Luke out of his normal path. Not that she’s known Luke well, but… The idea that he, too, was being manipulated seems more likely than he just woke up one night in a murderous rage.)

She’s caught other pieces of his past, both when he’s spoken of it, and sometimes when he dreams. Sometimes the words stop, but she can still feel, or ghost along in the back of, his images.

She knows he’s gotten views of sand and scrounging, of red pain and black fear, the taste of scorched air without a hint of moisture, the eternal gnaw of low grade hunger, and the smell of cleaning solvents off of her.

“You’re thinking loudly,” he says to her as she’s not looking at him, but not exactly seeing the plate of noodles and vegetables they’re sharing.

She’s noticed that’s a shorthand they’re developing, too, a way to make it clear that the option of talking about those thoughts is available, but not prying them out of each other’s heads without regard to the idea that sometimes some thoughts should stay private.

Finn and Rose never have this problem. Their brains stay nicely in their own heads, and sometimes she envies that. But, having acknowledged that he’s aware of where her thoughts are, she knows it’s okay to bring them to her lips.

“I’ve never been to school. I don’t know what to do with them, Kylo.”

“What did you do today?”

“Dug a trench, put a pipe together, three times, and finally got it working, and then buried it. Then they showed me how to ride the Faviers. We caught some fish, cleaned it, cooked it, I made sure they ate, and then came here.”

“Doesn’t sound like a bad day to me. Granted, I did tax reports and recruiting targets today.”

He pushes his chair back a little, and undoes his tunic, not taking it off, just… getting comfortable, she guesses. There’s a wash of putting something together, the image of Ben, of loose robes without a lot of structure, light, warm colors that wrapped around him… All banished by stiff, structured, tight, black.

He inclines his eyebrows a bit, letting her know that’s not something he ever consciously thought about, but it’s likely right. 

He pulls the image to the front of his mind, and shares it with her. A small boy with dark, unruly hair, most of it just long enough to brush the nape of his neck, but he had a little braid hanging down on his right side. He wore tan trousers, an ecru shirt that wrapped around him and tied at his waist, and a darker brown jacket, with the same wrap around styling. In the image, his hands and feet are bare, and he’s reaching out… calling something to him.

“A book. The first thing I successfully, intentionally called to my hand was a book.”

“A good one?”

“Back then, any book I hadn’t already read fifty times was a good one. There weren’t a lot of things I liked doing that didn’t make the adults nervous, but reading was one of them.” He thinks back, and Rey can feel the weight of the book in his hands. It’s a slim volume, just as thick as one of her hands, bound in smooth leather. “Poems about the Force. Somewhere between prayers and songs. Luke liked them.”

Kylo shakes his head. She gets a view of Luke watching, encouraging him, and the few other children with him, telling them to clear their minds and really feel whatever it was they were trying to move. “He’s only a few years older than I am now in that memory.”

“What did you do? In school… What was an average day like?”

He doesn’t smile at the memory, but she can feel he’s… not at peace with it, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. “The school was self-sufficient. The only things Luke bought were things we just couldn’t make for ourselves, mostly structural metals, wires, plasteel, transteel, things like that. He split the days into even and odd with different schedules for each. Every day started with chores. You’d either be on food prep or taking care of the animals, and we all did all of it, so it was just a matter what day it was. I had food prep on even days. Half of the time you’d be steeping tea, and making porridge, toasting bread or frying eggs, and the other half you’d be feeding and milking the sheep, feeding the hflers, and collecting eggs from the ugandos. Once morning chores were over, we’d have breakfast. Communal meal, everyone eats together, everyone cleans up together.

“After that, even days are lesson days: Reading, writing, math, geography, history, an hour of each. That was the morning session. Lunch break, again, communal, this time though everyone cooks, eats, and cleans up. Recess. We’d have an hour to do whatever we liked. Afternoon session: The Church of the Force. Holy doctrine, philosophy, theology, history of the church, history of great Jedi. That’s another four hours. Supper break. Like breakfast, half of us are taking care of the animals, half of us are cooking, then all together for the meal and clean up.

“After supper, an hour of quiet study, whatever interested us, but _quiet._ That left two hours of the night to ourselves to do whatever we liked. Then to our cottages and lights out.”

“What did you do the other day?”

“Meals and taking care of the animals stayed the same, we just switched what we were doing. Morning session was physical Force work. Go at it rested and calm and well-fed. That would be everything from levitating things to lightsaber practice to one-handed handstands to… all of it. We’d all be exhausted, hungry, and sweaty by the end of that. Again, lunch. Instead of a free hour, we’d spend that time on keeping up the property. Fixing things, tending the gardens, stuff like that. Later afternoon, making things. And that covered everything from learning how to shear the sheep and hflers, clean their wool, spin it, and then weave it and sew our clothing, to building lightsabers.”

“You sew?” She has a hard time imagining that.

“I even knit.” He flashes her an image of a much younger version of himself with a ball of tan yarn, and four knitting needles in a square, fingers moving fast and easy, working on what she assumes is a sock, while he reads something. “I can make butter and cheese. I built my lightsaber. I’ve put up cherry preserves, and installed windows, and helped to patch leaking domes, and built comm systems, and weeded gardens, and… I wasn’t very good with the animals. They didn’t like me all that much, and the plants weren’t a whole lot better, but anything that took quick hands, an eye for detail, and precision, I was great at.” He shrugs a little. “Luke grew up on a self-sufficient farm. That’s what he knew how to do, so that’s how he build his school.” Then he sighs a little, thinking of what happened on the odd days after supper.

Rey feels the tension in that sigh. She sends him the sense of _tell me more._ Rey more than knows that Kylo has enough sarcasm for a good six people stuffed into his skin. And when he lets it go… He could cut plasteel with the scorn in his voice as he says, “Then dinner again, and after that meditation time. Sit quietly, focus down, and find your nice, _calm, peaceful, light side center_.” His voice is sharp, and she can feel he’s quoting Luke. “’Feel the Force, let it lead you to a deeper communion with the light inside you. Let it help you to release your dark feelings. They’re a prison, looking to capture your spirit and trap your will, so just sit comfortably, relax, open your minds and’…” Sarcasm, scorn, anger, aimed at Luke, she feels that, and it’s probably a good ninety percent of the dark in him right now, but there’s another ten percent simmering under there, aimed at the boy who was Ben, who just _couldn’t_ master those skills, who couldn’t let it go. “And next thing I know ‘Vader’s’ in my head telling me about how useless all of this is and how I was meant for the dark and denying my true self is a betrayal of everything that matters and…” His tone goes normal again. “Then two more hours on our own, and bedtime again.”

“Luke just… let him play in your mind?”

That gets a sigh, too. An annoyed one. He pokes the noodles with a fork, but doesn’t lift a bite to his lips.  “Not exactly. He tried walling my mind off. Unfortunately, he only seemed to have two levels, completely cut off from the Force, or not nearly enough to keep Snoke out. The only thing more troubling than a voice talking in your head is a voice you can just barely hear. Little non-distinct whispers in the back of my mind for weeks until he gave that up. He tried teaching me how to do it. But, I didn’t want to shut out the only voice telling me I was just fine the way I was.”

Rey can understand that. She knows what she would have given to have had a voice pet and praise her. Someone to tell her she mattered.

Another though springs into her mind, unbidden, Han saying that one of the students killed all of the other ones.

This time Kylo doesn’t wait to respond. He looks up from the supper he’s not eating, making sure he’s got eye contact as he says, “Not all of them. Not even most of them, though I assume that’s likely the story their parents were told. Likely the story their parents wanted to hear.”

“What happened?”

“I may have been the only dark student there, but I wasn’t the only one with some dark tendencies. All four of us who weren’t pristinely light had a difficult time there. And when he attacked me, I blasted him back, shattered my cottage with the force of it, buried him in the rubble. I wasn’t exactly calm or unmoved by the experience, so I was screaming at him about attacking me in my sleep, attacking the stones above him with my saber. And that attracted the attention of the other students. They ran to us.

“I knew he wasn’t dead, but M’Gll didn’t.

“She was my age, the only other Master, and she was not, on any level, dark. She was… what they’d hoped I’d be. Poised and calm and steady. Passionless and easily centered. Good. Always so easily good. And what she loved more than anything was the idea of righteous justice. She adored the stories of the great Jedi Knights, the warriors of the Old Republic, who hunted down and destroyed the Sith.

“She found me standing in the rubble, blade extended, screaming about killing him, and between that and the fact she’d always been aware of my dark, her blade was out, and she’d rallied most of the school to her side to take down the baby Sith in their midst.

“Three of the other students joined me, and we won. Eight on four, and the youngest one was fourteen. Luke had long given up on finding small children at that point, thinking the training worked better with older students. I only fought M’Gll. By the time we were done, the rest of the students were, too. I burned the school, burned the library, burned the barns, burned everything. I marked their faces with ash. The Jedi didn’t want us, but I did. So they were mine. The Knights of Ren. Kammun could fly, so he got us out of there, and I knew where we needed to go.”

“You knew Luke was still alive?”

He nods. “Yes. Unconscious, wounded, and buried, but alive. I wanted him to feel just as betrayed when he woke up as I did.”

“The ones who joined you… What happened to them?”

There’s a tiny quirk to his lip that could be a smile if it weren’t so sad. “The Knights of Ren. We trained with Snoke for several years, and for several years our main job was the destruction of any Force sensitive person he could find. He didn’t have a hard time convincing us that any new Jedi was a mortal threat to our continued existence. Though through the years we found two more who also became Knights.”

“And now?” She knows he is, or was, the Master of the Knights of Ren, but she’s never seen a Knight of Ren, and he doesn’t exactly talk about them.

“Four years ago, I had my _final test_ proving that I’d overcome any last thread of light. I knelt there and let him kill them in front of me. That’s why he was so sure he couldn’t be betrayed. If I didn’t break for comrades I’d known and fought with for decades at that point, what was the value of a stranger?”

Rey doesn’t know what to do with that. Part of her is revolted at the idea of him kneeling there, letting it happen. Part of her, like Poe, feels like this is the saddest thing she’s ever heard. Part of her wants to go find Snoke and kill him all over again, just to do it.

Kylo nods. “Add in grief on top of that, and good helping of self-loathing, and that’s about right. He told me to remember that feeling, all of the grasping black tendrils of it, and that through it, I’d be stronger than anyone who ever came up against me.” His voice is sounding detached as he says, “And from that day on, I didn’t lose a single fight, except for training matches against Phasma, until I went up against you.

“The last thing he said to me, before I went to find you the first time, was ‘Even you, Master of the Knights of Ren, have never been so tested…’ He’d rub it in, remind me of it, call me _Master_ , when he wanted that extra jolt of hate. Make me that much more dangerous, steep myself in that much more loathing.”

She gives his hand a gentle squeeze.

He’s not looking at her as he says, “The job of the Master is to lead and protect his charges. I led them, but didn’t protect them.” Then he does look at her, shuddering all over, before saying. “School.” He rubs his lips together. “Uh… make sure they have time to run around. That’s the thing I found most useful. If you’ve got time to physically do stuff, whatever you’re doing with your brain’ll stick better.”

“Okay.”

“Um…” He blinks, thinking. “You don’t actually know how to read… I mean, not in a way you can teach someone else, right?”

She thinks about it, and comes to the conclusion he’s likely right about that.

“And you’ve only got the one copy of your library…”

She nods at that, too.

“How many, total, do you think you can handle? What’s the largest number of students you’ll take?”

“As many as Poe brings me?” That there might be a limit on this wasn’t something she’d considered.

He shakes his head at that. “Set a top number. Eventually you’ll hit a point where it’s just too many of them, unless you get more adults.”

“Okay… Uh… Thirty.”

“Tomorrow.” He eats a bite of the noodles. And she realizes she’s also been ignoring the meal, so likewise lifts a bite to her lips. “I’ll get you thirty primers and thirty blank pads. You’ll have copies of your library so everyone can read at once, and something they can learn to read from.”

“You can…”

“We’ve got tens of thousands of children on this ship alone, and the First Order makes sure they can all read and write and do basic math. Can’t be good soldiers if they can’t do that. Getting equipment for your sprogs will barely put a dent in a rounding error in our equipment levels.” 

She thinks about that, and then says, “Kylo, are they First Order primers?”

He inclines his head a bit, not sure what she means by that. Obviously, they’re First Order primers.

“Are they filled with short, easy stories about how amazing Snoke is, and how the Resistance is evil, and…”

He winces, remembering how all of those stories of the Jedi heroes shaped his past. “I’ll check. If they are… I’m sure C8 can find thirty, basic, non-First Order primers.” He sighs at that, too, and then shakes his head. “Kill the past step seven thousand fifty-six, if they’re First Order indoctrination documents, I’ve got to get rid of them anyway.”

She takes another bite of the noodles. “There’s your ‘random spot check’ for tomorrow night.”

 

 

* * *

After that conversation, neither of them are feeling especially playful or sexy. So dinner wraps up, and slides into bath time, which helps some, and from there both of them are looking for a bit more time between those memories and anything approaching erotic touch, but it’s getting later.

Rey’s checked the chronometer six times in the last twenty minutes.

“You’re worried.”

“They’re all alone there. And unlike you, I don’t have a comm if something goes wrong.”

“Do you want to go back to your cottage?” he looks disappointed at that.

“I want _us_ to go back to my cottage. You installed the locks yourself; you know they work. How about you try sleeping there again?”

“Just sleep?”

“Not necessarily. Our usual evening, just, at my place.”

He thinks about that for a moment and then says, “What if they hear?”

She looks amused at that. Yes, they make noise, but besides their first time, she doesn’t recall him, or her, ever shouting. “How loud are you planning on being? They’ve got their own cottages, not sleeping on the floor in mine. I just want to be closer if they need an adult.”

“What if the Force sensitive one—“ he pauses for that child’s name.

“Marrok.”

“Senses me?”

She can feel he’s looking for excuses to stay here. “Have you met him before?”

He flashes her an irked look.

“Then if he sense you, all he’ll know is that I’ve got a friend who comes to visit at night.”

“A dark friend?” his voice is sharp.

“Is the stress on dark or friend?” She can feel he’s dealing with both of those words.

“Both?”

She rests her palms against his chest. “ _My_ dark friend… lover… mirror… mate… man… balance… The dark gray to my light?” She kisses him. “What would you have me call you?”

 _Husband_ arcs through him, and she feels it, but he doesn’t give it voice. “Friend is fine.”

She holds out her hand to him. “Come home with me, friend.”

 

 

* * *

For weeks, the Supremacy has known that changes are coming. Whispers of new badges and new stencils and preparations for a huge rally have been galloping through the halls and canteens.

Where the rumors haven’t been stirring, much, was among the children and sub-adults. They go about their days as usual, training, learning to be effective members of the First Order.

And then, one day, the lessons in their pads suddenly _changed._ The basic content was the same. The Aurebesh, basic math, fundamentals of grammar, colors, shapes, and species all of that was the same, but the stories of the glory of the First Order all _vanished_ overnight. The series of _Adventures of Hux,_ featuring a young Armitage Hux, illustrated with soft edges, fluffy red hair, and big blue eyes, overcoming all challenges for the glory of the First Order ceased to exist. The _Captain Phasma Comics_ , illustrated stories aimed at the girls of the First Order, making sure they all knew that just because they were girls didn’t mean they couldn’t be just as strong and useful as the boys, evaporated overnight. The tales of First Order soldiers bravely fighting against the Evil Republic were suddenly replaced with tales of fluffy animals and cute robots. Evil Jedi plotting behind closed doors to corrupt the Force and ensorcel the unwary fled to the ethers. 

Their teachers were just as shocked as the children to find their lesson plans suddenly irrelevant as the texts they were teaching from disappeared.

But all of them were more than bright enough to know that while computers can glitch, _this_ isn’t the sort of thing that happens as the result of a glitch.

And three days after the change, when they got the official command, from Supreme Leader Ren, explaining how they were getting out of the propaganda business and into the teaching business, those murmurs turned into a full out chorus of curious voices.

They could understand getting rid of the Adventures of Hux and Captain Phasma Comics, both Hux and Phasma were gone, but… The rest of it? Why get rid of the history of the First Order? Why stop teaching what made the First Order the First Order?

Something’s coming all right, and _everyone_ is talking about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, got some notes on this one. 
> 
> A: I do not for one minute believe Luke 'I-Can-Sense-The-Good-In-You' Skywalker was sitting in his hut one night, contemplating the nature of the Force or whatnot, and decided that the kid he’d been raising for the last however long suddenly posed an existential level threat to everything he ever worked for so he got up, grabbed his lightsaber, sauntered on over to Ben’s cottage to go take his head off.
> 
> No.
> 
> THAT DID NOT HAPPEN.
> 
> That said, Snoke, “Check me out, I’ve got more Force power in my toenail than the next six Jedi combined” poking around in Luke’s mind, flooding him with dark images, makes a lot of sense to me.
> 
> And given what Luke did next, SHUT HIMSELF OFF FROM THE FORCE COMPLETELY, I’m thinking that Luke knew he was being played, so he took himself out of the game so he couldn’t be played again.
> 
> B: I’m not kidding, Hux had plans. If you want to check out: http://kerylraist.tumblr.com/post/173123942443/ottenebrare-wishing-a-very-happy-belated you’ll have an idea of the kinds of images I’m talking about. I don’t know why, but the idea of Hux, sitting there, in his rooms, plotting his eventual overthrow of Snoke, down to making sure that the entire upcoming generation of soldiers worshipped him, just tickles me to no end. 
> 
> C: One of you asked, and if one of you asks, that likely means more are wondering the same thing, so, if you see Kylo and Rey talking in italics with no quotes, that’s them thinking to each other. By this part in the story they are capable of full telepathic conversation. 
> 
> That said, some things are better off just left in their own minds, and they’re trying to figure out how to not just blast each other with everything they’re thinking and feeling.


	12. Nude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As the title suggests, this one is MAJORLY NSFW. If you prefer a picture-free experience, I also post on ff.net (same name, same title) and there are no pictures there.

 

2/4/36 ABY

 

There are some rumors that Kylo wishes to explore deeper.

For example, he is aware, in the sense of he’s heard people, soldiers, talking about what they intend to do with their ‘friends’ or the pleasure specialists, so he knows there are more ways to have sex than him on top or her on top. (Though so far, he’s enjoyed those options quite a bit.) Or with their mouths.

He’s just… not entirely sure what they may be.

Because that’s pretty much all he’s ever done.

He’s sort of remembering them on their sides the first night, but at this point he’s not entirely sure if that actually happened or if he dreamed it. (Though he’s thinking that if he can dream it, he can do it… Probably. One of these mornings they’ll linger in bed long enough to try that again, because he’s thinking that’s going to be a _very_ good way to wake up.)

And, she’s sat in his lap, grinding on him, so… That’s likely an option. Maybe even in his pool. (The idea of which he likes quite a bit, too.)

But that’s pretty much where his imagination peters out.

He’s got the sense though, that there’s probably more.

 

 

* * *

He knows she has books. Any time he goes to Lirium, and it’s pouring down rain, which is happening more often now that it’s fully autumn, he finds her in her cottage reading something.

He also knows not to ask where she got the books. Wherever her cottage was before, he knows he’s not supposed to know. It’s a place. Orlac apparently runs it. She was there. He let her read. Now she’s not there. But she seems to have a very well-stocked data-pad.

He’s never poked at it before, but… People write books about things they like. He can’t imagine he’s the only person in the galaxy who likes sex and wants to learn more about it.

And, worst comes to worst, he tries, and there’s nothing there.

They’re wrapping up dinner. Since the children have moved in, they’ve taken to eating and… anything else they’d really prefer not to be interrupted at… at his place. The kids are curious, and have a tendency to hang around her when they aren’t at their work, but are pretty good at letting Rey have a few hours a night to ‘meditate undisturbed.’ But with the children there, she prefers to sleep nearby. If there’s a problem in the night, she wants to be close enough to do something about it. 

It’s… he supposes it’s a lot like living in a place where you have several different rooms. The home he was born in had a dining room, and his bedroom, and a room for his parents, and a reading room, and a bathroom, and some other ones he didn’t spend any time in. So, sometimes he’d be in one room, and sometimes he’d go to another, and that was just… life.

Just, some of their rooms are on a ship in the middle of the galaxy, and some of them are in a cottage on a planet in the middle of nowhere.

As he’s tidying up their plates, he says, “Do you mind if I read your data pad?”

She’s startled and a little surprised by that. He does read. A lot. He’s got data pads coming out of his ears, all stuffed with reports and plans and more reports and other plans and…

“You want to read _my_ pad?”

He nods. “I… have an idea. I want to see if I’m right.”

She shrugs and then says, “Early night at my place?”

They have sex most nights, but just snuggling up to read and sleep is always an option. Even Force wielders have long days and get tired.

He shakes his head, and lays a kiss on her throat. “I _hope_ not.” Then he’s gone. A moment later, he’s back with the pad. It lives next to her bed, and he’s seen her use it enough to know the code on it.

He tosses it on his bed, and takes off his tunic and gloves, leaving him in his shirt and trousers. Then he flops onto his stomach, grabbing a pillow, folding it up and tucking it under his chest before reaching for the pad.

She comes closer, undoing her belt, taking off her bracer, crawling onto the bed, and settling herself on his back.

 

 

She kisses his shoulder, and he turns his face, pressing against her hers, feeling very content for a moment, before grinning at her, then, making sure she’s reading along with him, he finds the search feature and types in SEX.

He feels her gasp, and the wave of curiosity that goes with it. “I never thought to look.” The datapad spits back 34,968 responses. “We’re going to be here all night, and not in a good way,” Rey says, noticing that all of the titles on the first screen are all about the biology of sex, sex differences, mating habits in various creatures, and _not_ what Kylo’s looking for.

FUCKING

That gets three naughty poems, two dictionaries of slang, a novel, and a play.

“That’s more of a library than I was expecting,” Kylo says.

“Still not what you’re looking for, right?”

He rubs the back of his head against her chin. He’ll read the poems later, and the novel if he ever gets an entire afternoon free again. “Not exactly.”

He’s tapping his finger against the pad, trying to think of another search term. She reaches down and types in NUDE.

That pulls up… “Oh!” Kylo says, feeling his skin heat up.

Rey wriggles a little on his back.

Of course Orlac’s library would have books of nudes. He runs an _art school_ for the Force’s sake! Lots of them. Beautiful ones. Erotic ones. Scary ones. Black and white and color and everything in between. All different shapes and sizes and sexes and genders and races and species and… Anything that might like looking at naked versions of itself or others has pictures in there.

Kylo narrows it with HUMAN NUDES, and that gets it more into the sort of territory they’re interested in.

Rey leans over his shoulder and adds EROTIC to it.

And that’s where the good stuff is. Close to 200 titles pop up.

Her lips are touching his ear as she says, voice low, “What’s got you thinking about this?”

“You… Things I want to do with you…” He looks away from the pad and the list of titles they haven’t clicked on, yet. She’s looking down at him, and he half shrugs. “Everything I’ve mastered, I trained for. Studied. Learned. Practiced. I know I don’t… know much about this, and… It seems like the kind of thing I’d like to learn more about.” He gives her a quick kiss. “With you.”

“You’re good at this.”

He smiles at her. “Maybe I could be better?”

“Feels good to me.”

He kisses her. “Good.”

He feels some doubt creep into her mind. “You think it’s good, too, right?”

He holds her up with the Force and rolls over so he can face her easily, and kiss her without straining. Then gently settles her against his front. He’s already hard, and rubs it against her a bit. “If I don’t think it’s good, nothing happens.”

“Nothing was happening. I was on your back.”

“My back likes you on me, and I like the idea of looking at pictures like this, with you.”

That takes her by surprise.

“And I like the idea of you looking at them, picking something out, and having me try it with you.” He kisses her again. “And I’ll probably want to try just about everything I see with you. I want to try everything I can imagine, and I want to be able to imagine even more, and…” and he’s not sure how to say he’s had sex with ladies who weren’t terribly interested in if he was any good at it, because the sex part, specifically if they got anything out of it, wasn’t the point of it. And he doesn’t want that, with her. And he thinks they’re good, but maybe better is out there. And he’s never been good at much of anything, not without studying, and this might be like with the training droids, where the only reason he’s good is because he can use the Force, and he’d like to be good in his own right and… it might be fun.

She kisses the tip of his nose. And then his forehead. “It’s complicated in there, isn’t it?”

 

 

He shrugs. “Look at some pretty pictures with me?”

“Sure.”

He props the pillows up at the head of his bed, and then scoots up, back against the headboard, legs spread in front of him. She settles between them, back to his chest. He holds the pad, and she’s in charge of flipping from picture to picture.

She clicks at one of the book more or less at random. The names of the artists don’t mean anything to either of them.

They’re charcoal sketches, more the suggestion of bodies than anything explicit. Kylo can see enjoying drawing something like that, the feel of the charcoal on paper, and swoop of the lines is probably pleasing, but not necessarily looking at them. Rey’s fairly indifferent to them, and they flip through, fast.

The second book is male nudes, also drawings. Rey’s vastly more interested in them than he is. They’re all… very… male. _Extremely_ male. He gently bites the crest of her ear and says quietly, “I’ve seen literally thousands of naked men in the showers over the years, and _none_ of them have those proportions.”

She’s intently looking at the extremely fit gentleman in front of them, and then says, “What would you _do_ with _that_? I mean, I don’t think it would fit... anywhere.” She’s looking from her hand to the picture and back to her hand, and he can feel she’s fairly sure she can’t wrap a hand around that, let alone anything else.

Kylo laughs at that, feeling a bit goofy. “Strut around and let people look at it. Not much good for anything else. You’d pass out from low blood pressure if it ever got hard enough to use.”

She giggles at that, and flicks to the next picture... Apparently, at least in the world of those drawings, it can get hard without knocking out its owner, and there is a place that fits, which it’s owner seems quite pleased by, and it’s not a place either she, or Kylo, had ever imagined fitting something like that.

They look at each other, somewhat scandalized, shake their heads, and Kylo flicks to the next book. 

This one is much more to Kylo’s liking, and he feels Rey’s breath catch at the first image, so it seems to be working for her, too.

They’re photographs, black and white, elegant, sensual, and if he hadn’t already been hard, his shaft would have sprung into action at the sight of these.

The first one… It’s a person. He thinks it’s a woman, but from the angle he’s not sure, and doesn’t much care. He can see a hip, and the dip of a low back, and she… he… has nicely toned muscles, but nothing much to distinguish which sex it may be. The person kissing the top of her/his buttock is male. Strong jaw, full lips, a bit of stubble, gentle brush of lips on skin.

It’s making Kylo squirm, because seeing it, he can imagine doing it to Rey. Her standing, naked, before him, and he’d kneel, run his lips from the crest of her hip to buttock, and down the inside of her leg, sucking soft pink marks into her skin.

The next shot doesn’t have any faces in it. A couple, spooning, from shoulders to knees. This one is definitely male and female. Kylo wonders if they look like that when they’re falling asleep. Probably. The male’s a lot bigger than his companion, and he’s wrapped around her completely.

And in the next shot, his hands are roaming. Her legs are flush to each other, but he’s cupping her delta in his palm, and again, there are no faces in the shot, but Kylo’s got a good sense from the arch of her back, and the way she’s gripping his wrist, that she likes what he’s doing.

And apparently she wants him to do it with his tongue, too. There’s a shot of the woman, straddling the man’s face. Her back is bent, head back, mouth open, eyes closed. She’s not classically beautiful of face. He doubts he’d look twice at her if she were one of his officers, in full uniform, but the expression is captivating. It’s shot from above and behind, so they can’t see much of the man, just that he’s got one hand extended, cupping her breast.

The next shot is the close up of her breast, and his fingers, lightly stroking a hard nipple.

Kylo’s squirming harder, because he definitely wants to do that with Rey _now._ Wants her kneeling above his face, rocking against his lips.

And she’s rearranging them, so she’s straddling his legs, not between them.

Her hips roll at that next image, the couple, standing, her leg crooked over his hip, his hand cupped under her bottom. His mouth on her collar bone, her face pressed to his temple, her hand in his hair.

Kylo licks her ear and says quietly, “Standing.” That triggers a memory of what may have been a dream or maybe the Force bond or… He’s not sure, but he was standing in the pool, he remembers that now. That picture though… he doesn’t think the way it is in the photograph is an option, not for them. He’s too tall and Rey’s too short, but he can pick her up and…

And the next picture’s more or less exactly what he was thinking. She’s climbed her companion, arms around his shoulders, legs around his hips, and he’s holding her up. She’s high enough up that he’s looking up at her, and she’s looking down at him, and between the position, and the naked bodies, and the facial expressions, Kylo’s not sure if he wants to stroke himself to this photograph or hang it up on his wall as art.

He definitely wants to do this with Rey.

He’s also realizing that he does not, in fact, need two hands to hold the data pad. One of them could be holding _her,_ and as soon as that thought goes wandering from the back of his mind to the front, his hand is worming its way into her shirt, looking to find skin.

She moans, softly, when his fingers find her breast, and arches into his touch, rocking her hips, too.

It’s not one of the pictures, but it’s occurring to him that if her pants were located anywhere other than on her body, and his pants were likewise not on him, she could just slip onto him, the way they are now, and he could touch her all over, and instead of the sweet, diffuse pleasure of her butt rocking against him, he could be feeling the sharp, concentrated joy of her body on his.

That hand goes wandering down, looking for the top button on her pants.

She flips to the next picture. 

He feels it thrill through her, and it’s working a treat for him, too. They’d only have to shift a bit, and get rid of all of this clothing. If they ever do this again, and he _really_ hopes they do, they’re doing it naked.

He undoes the button on her pants, pulls down the zip, and she rubs her maomao against his palm.

“That one?” he asks.

“Yes.”

He kisses her shoulder and neck and jaw, “Yes…”

The lady’s on the bed, on her stomach, spread out, and this is the first of the pictures where _everything_ is on display. Her companion is kneeling over her, hands and knees, his legs between hers, his hands on the bed next to her shoulders. He’s kissing his way down her spine, and his shaft is a hair away from touching her, slipping in, and Kylo’s thinking it’s a good thing he didn’t know pictures like this existed when he was a teenager, because if he had, he would have done nothing but look at them and stroke himself.

In a second, she’s up, turning, ripping off her clothing, and he is, too. She’s already mostly undressed, so it doesn’t take her that long.

He on the other hand…

“Did the person who made these not like you, or something?” Rey asks as she’s fighting with Kylo’s pants. “These things are ridiculous. Why do they have so many buttons?”

Kylo would have to admit that’s a question he’s never asked, but as he’s thinking about it, perhaps he doesn’t need trousers with a fifteen button fly.

“Says the girl with the sleeves that take ten minutes to put on.” Though it’s taken all of ten seconds to pull them off.

“On! When have you ever complained about me staying _longer?”_

“Good point!” He just yanks the fabric apart, and the remaining three buttons go flying. “I’m getting a fucking kilt. You could just flip it up.”

That makes her laugh as she’s pushing off his pants and undershorts. “You’ve got bony knees.”

“I’ll strike terror through the galaxy in a black kilt, with my pale, white, bony knees!” He poses for her, hands on his hips, chest puffed out, shorts around said knees, standing on his bed.

They’re both laughing at that.

She yanks those shorts down, and grabs him by the back of the knee, taking him down onto the bed, then she pounces on top of him.

He wriggles under her, enjoying the feel of her body on top of his, her lips on his, and all of her sweet, sweet skin making his skin sing.

“You keep,” he says between kisses, “doing this,” and more, “and we’re not” another kiss, “going to get to that picture.”

Then she’s off of him, spread out on her stomach across his bed, and for a moment he’s just got to look.

For a moment. Then his fingertips find her skin, and he trails them over her shoulders and arms, down the lines of her back, across her buttocks, between them, fast and light, finding her wet and slick and waiting for him, and then down the insides of her legs.

He doesn’t know how the man in the picture felt when it was being taken. He does know how he feels, hot and tense and powerful and _primal._

He’s already on the bed, so he can’t exactly stalk her, but he can feel the idea of it. She’s sleeping, having an excellent dream, a sexy one, spread out because it’s warm and she doesn’t need any blankets, and he’s moving across the room, silent, slipping up on her, knees between hers, stretching out a bit, hands supporting him as his lips find her neck and back and that contact makes her moan, a soft, ragged, needy sound.

Hearing that is rushing through him, making him even harder, tenser, more ready to pounce.

Rey cants her hips a little, brushing against his tip, and that’s all the invitation he needs.

 

 

He arches forward, sinking into her with a loud gasp. His arms come to rest under her shoulder, his hands cupped around them, and his lips find her back.

She’s moaning, too. He’s at a _really_ good angle right now. The one that hits that _spot_ and makes her body light up.

 

 

Her head rears up and he’s laying soft kisses and sharp little nips up her shoulder and neck while rocking his hips slow and steady.

She’s flexing up to meet him, liquid and hot, and as long as they keep going slow and easy, this works.

This is good. It’s sending sparks up his legs and shaft and balls and he really likes it… But, it’s not enough. He could probably do this all night, and mostly just get an extremely pleasant workout out of it. And he can feel from the way she’s moving, that frustrated roll of her hips, that she’s in the same ship.

Can’t go too deep like this. Can’t pull back too far or he slips out. He can’t really get to her pearl. But… he could be on his knees, and she could be on her hands and knees, and they could probably go really fast and deep like that, and the idea of how it’d feel and look flashes through him, with a rush of hot pleasure.

He pulls back, kneeling, and takes her hips in his hands, pulling her up, too. She’s a few inches off the bed when she freezes, and he feels her go cold, and a flash of red fear and pain. He knows, too late, that there are some bad memories associated with this position.

He lets go and stops, dead. “I’m… we don’t… Not…”

She raises herself onto her hands and knees. “I want to… enjoy this… too. Just… keep talking to me.” _Make me know it’s you. Keep me out of the memories._

“You sure?” _We_ really _don’t have to do this._

“Yes.”

“Okay… How about.” He’s holding himself by the base, and just touches her with the tip of it. “You move onto me. I’m going to stay still, you just, come to me. Set the pace, do it how you like it, okay?”

“Okay…” And she does, slowly, easing back.

 

 

He keeps his hands gentle, soft, stroking along her back and hips… Talking… Shit, he’s got no idea what to say, and he doesn’t want her to stop or get lost, but there are basically _no_ words in his head right now, and…

 _Uhnh!_ It’s not exactly a word, but it’s heartfelt. She’s right up against him, and the angle is sweet and... He rocks against her, a little, nothing too hard or fast, just a bit more friction, roll of his hips.

Her head drops, and a strangled “Kylo!” pants from her lips.

“Yeah… It me… Just keep moving, love, keep moving… make us both feel sweet.”

She does, rocking all the way forward, and all the way back, and both of them are gasping at it.

“Oh… It’s good… so good… oh fuck!” His eyes are closed, head back, focusing himself in and down to the feel of her on him, and controlling his desire to thrust hard and fast and deep. “So sweet…” He swallows hard. She’s all the way back again and grinding against him, looking for an angle that sparks through her, and he feels her shudder when she gets it, the one where he hits _right_ there.

“Feels good?”

She groans, which he takes as a yes.

He opens his eyes, watching her move against him, and that pulls him even higher, harder. “It looks so good…” He swallows hard, seeing her body sliding against his. “I’m never closing my eyes again.” It’s just so… “Beautiful…” She’s wet and glistening and clinging to him on the outstroke and enveloping him on the instroke and he’s a liar by another two strokes because if he keeps watching he’s going to spurt, hard, now. Soft, needy sounds keep panting out from between his lips, and none of them are words, but it’s voice and… he licks his lips and says, “I’m getting a mirror… Next time we do this, I want you to see how good this looks, too.”

“Good?”

“So good…” his eyes open again and it’s just… “So good…” His eyes slide shut and he gives himself a hard squeeze to slow himself down.

She pulls all the way off of him, giving him another few breaths to get under control before easing back. Another low groan pours out of his mouth. “Oh…” exhaled on each breath as his hips roll against her. He doesn’t think he could be still right now if his life depended on it.

“Kylo!” her voice, up a few octaves. That roll’s doing good things for her, too.

“Yeah… Oh love… feel me… feel me…” It’s so intense. Probably because he’s only touching her with his shaft and fingertips. Everything’s focused down to one, long, shuddering slide.

He’s breathing faster, rocking harder against her, hips and thighs and butt flexing, and he wants to grab her by the hips, pull her against him, bury himself in fast, hard thrusts.

His hands fall to her hips and he chokes out, “Can I?”

“YES!”

Her head is back, back arched, hips and butt flush to him, and he’s squeezing hard, pulling her closer, himself deeper, rocking faster. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck…” it’s a mantra, punctuating each thrust.

 

 

He’s so close; his motions are getting jagged, and his fine muscle control is shot. He’s just hanging on long enough to feel her start to twitch and… “OH FUCK!” she does, shuddering around him, and he’s gone, everything in his body releasing at once as he pulls her against him hard, burying himself for a good long pulse, and then a few sharp thrusts, and then quiet, both of them awash in pounding hearts and heavy breaths.

He drops to his hands, his chin against her shoulder, and kisses gently, though mostly he’s just resting, his lips against her.

When he feels like his joints are working again, he reaches down, cupping her maomao. He kisses her ear, and says, “Me. Just me. No fear or pain or bad memories. Just me.” He’s still hard enough for another thrust, gentle and easy this time. “Just us, and just this, sweet, sweet this.”

Her hand finds his, and gives him a gentle squeeze.

 

 

* * *

_Uhnh!_

“Kylo!”

The first and least desirable job of a new recruit to the First Order is cleaning staff. And, while it’s true that there are droids that can move through the Supremacy cleaning things, it’s also true that for a lot of the new recruits, some sort of simple task that allows the higher ups to see how good you are at following orders, the kind of job you’ll do while following those orders, and the kind of information you may ferret out by following those orders, is vitally important to figuring out where you’ll go next.

It is also true that, for security purposes, Kylo’s private chambers have one door. That door is off of his office, which is behind his throne room.

Because he is never, simultaneously, located in his office and his private room, and because no one else is ever in his private room when he’s in his office, Kylo is woefully unaware of how bad the sound-proofing in his private chamber is.

Each night, new recruits, in teams of two clean his office. They sweep the floor, dust his desk and conference table, take out any trash there may be (there never is), and tidy any messes. Other than occasionally having to go after bloodstains and similar human detritus that the janitorial droid may have missed, there are rarely any messes in Kylo’s office.

So, on most nights, cleaning his office takes a matter of minutes.

And on most nights there’s nothing to hear while the janitors are there.

But _sometimes…_

The cleaners share a look, and a smirk. The Supreme Leader is having a _very_ good time tonight. Someone in the officer-eat-officer world of the First Order will pay well for this tidbit of information. It’s just a matter of finding the right ear.

 


	13. The Order

 

2/8/36 ABY

 

It’s been a long time since Kylo last did this. He’s standing in the bay overlooking the flight deck, a sheet of transteel between him and the now empty, at least of ships, hangar. He thinks of the last time he was here, he was waiting, not sure what was coming, just knowing, somehow that he needed to find a spot to be alone for a moment.

A good plan, because after that moment, he wasn’t alone. He was looking at Rey and she was calling him a murderous snake.

 _The difference a year and a half makes._ He shakes his head, rechecking the notes he made for his speech. _Year and a quarter._ Sixteen months can change a lot. He tucks the speech into his tunic. He knows the words, knows what he wants to say.

He looks out, seeing his troops filing in. Just about all of them who could be relieved from duty are here. Any he could afford, in the sense of spare from their duties, have been shipped in from his other commands. Rank after rank after rank of them. Stretching almost beyond what his eyes can see.

If they’re moving into place, that means half an hour to go.

Kylo squares his shoulders, then slips the helmet into his hands. He closes his eyes and settles it over his head. It seals on with a slight hiss. He touches the helmet, gloved fingers stroking over hard metal. After more than a year without it, it feels alien, strange and heavy. In retrospect, it always did. The thing he liked most about it was not that it was right, not that it was an extension of him, but that it hid him and any reaction he may have been having. Only another Force user could feel what was behind the mask, and that gave him an automatic air of deathly calm, which many men find unnerving.

Which gave him an automatic upper hand.

It commanded the respect that a tall, lanky, twenty-two-year-old who wore every feeling in his eyes, who had never won, let alone fought, a real battle couldn’t get from his face.

But he’s not twenty-two any longer.

And he’s won a position that demands respect.

He drapes the cloak back slightly, leaving his left arm visible. His previous shirts never had a mark of rank on them, because he was not actually a member of the First Order. The privileges of rank without the rank. He often thinks Snoke did that just to annoy Hux. To show him that a man didn’t need a uniform or marks to be obeyed. Unlike Hux, people followed his orders by the feel of his power alone.

 

 

His shirt bears a mark, now. His new symbol, a silver hexagon edging a black field, surrounding a silver circle, around a white circle with sixteen black rays connecting in the center.

He’s the only one with the silver hexagon. All of his citizens will have a white hexagon. His citizens will get the silver circle on their new badges. His troops will just have the white circle. But all of them are getting the new mark.

His commanders will keep their stripes.

But the Supreme Leader… No, not a Supreme Leader, not after today… The _Master_ needs no stripes. He needs no blaster. He has no guards. When he walks, he walks on his own, cloak billowing behind him, lightsaber on his hip, shoulders back, back straight. With the right mindset he can amp his power. His troops, his commanders, the ‘dignitaries’ he’s invited to this, they’ll all feel it in their guts and bones. Just being near him should make them want to kneel.

He smiles behind the mask, looking at the rally set out before him. More and more people are flowing in. Soon, he’ll stride out of there and make the first official, visible step of putting his mark on the First Order. Taking ownership of it. Stripping it of the past and making it _his._

He feels the presence to his left, slightly behind, and then next to him, looking out. The satisfaction, and desire, and glee at the sight of this is palpable, even from the shade.

“This is what we were meant for,” Hux says, a grand smile on his face. It was rare to ever see a look of unfettered joy on Hux’s face, but it’s there right now. He always did love a rally.

“You and Phasma, perhaps.”

He smirks at Kylo. “Don’t give me that, Ren. You feel the thrill of it, too. Hide your face behind that mask if you like, keep it to yourself, but you still feel it.”

Hux inhales, sharp, slightly shaky. Before Rey, he didn’t know all the layers of that look, it was just hot and _red._ He understood, in theory, what he was seeing, in the sense he could name it, but not, on any real level _understand._ Now Kylo knows that’s the way he looks at Rey when she takes him in hand, licks her lips, and meets his eyes, just about to take him into her mouth. Now he _knows_ how that feels, in his guts, and bones, and shaft. Again, a lot can change in sixteen months.

Hux’s jaw is tight, breathing a little fast, looking at rank upon rank of what he still considers his men. Kylo’d seen him do that in life, too.

And maybe he does feel a thrill at this, but… not like that that. Not even close. “Not the way you did… do. I don’t have to tape it to my thigh to keep my tunic hanging properly at one of these.”

Hux glances away from the men filling the hangar. “Don’t be crude, Ren.”

“Crude? You’re dead, and I can feel the heat pouring off of you.”

Hux is nonplussed by that. He is or was what he is or was and likes what he likes and this… he _likes_ this. “We were meant for this. Why fuck a woman when you can fuck a galaxy? You want crude… There it is. Take them out, march them through… anywhere. Conquer. Spill the blood and watch them beg. I know you’ve felt it. I know you gave orders for it. You’ve listened to the screams of innocents and felt it stir your blood. You’ve seen them on their knees, pleading, and your body thrilled at it. Maybe not the same way mine did, but you _felt_ it. Your skin sparked at it, your heart raced.” He looks out at the rally. “And you feel it now.”

He turns to Kylo, those pale blue/gray/green eyes, Kylo was never entirely sure what color Hux’s eyes were, other than cold, literally glowing blue now. “It’s about power, and always has been. That’s _why_ we get hard. And this… It’s the biggest fucking shaft in the galaxy, and you get to have everyone kneel and worship it. You like this, _Master Ren_. That’s where you want them, on their knees, before you, prostrate to your power.”

He looks at the saber on Kylo’s hip. “You took every title you’ve ever claimed with that. And you’ll keep them with that. You’ll throw them bones so you don’t have to use it as often, until you get bored with it. Until the training droids and the desert cunt can’t keep your interest. Until you crave the fight so hot that your blood boils.”

Hux rests his hand on the glass overlooking the rally. And Kylo tries his best to banish the fears Hux just named.

“We were not born to be politicians, Ren. We were not made for long-winded negotiations or compromise.” He sneers just at the idea of it. “You can pretend your fight isn’t there, hide it behind the image of the Master, but you know it’s there, and one day, it’ll come out.”

Kylo swallows at that. “You would have lived longer if you’d been this perceptive before.”

“I’d have lived longer if you’d stayed unconscious a few more seconds.” Hux nods to the rally. “Enjoy your victory parade.”

Kylo closes his eyes behind the mask, straightens his shoulders again, and forces his mind to calm.

 

 

* * *

Time to go.

He knows this is being recorded, played across sixty-thousand planets and tens of thousands of ships. His troops, his subjects, his people, they’re watching, or they will be.

He strides across the flight deck of the _Supremacy_. Walking tall, proud, each footfall echoing through the otherwise silent chamber. He gets to the podium, and faces his troops.

The podium is black, with his symbol draped over it. Snoke’s black on red flags fly behind him. The splashes of blood red look garish in the cold light of the _Supremacy_ flight deck. Last time this happened, it was Hux, standing in a similar space on Starkiller, shouting about the ascendancy of the First Order and the power, blah, blah, blah.

But Hux is dead. Even if he does come to visit from time to time. And so is that version of the First Order. Today he’s officially giving it its death blow. And it’s _not_ coming back.

And neither is the image of Kylo that Hux summoned.

He hopes. He wants to touch the token around his neck, under his shirt, warm against his skin, but doesn’t. It’s supposed to be Rey’s day with it, but he just… wanted it, for this.

Kill the past step six million: Past Kylo had no home. Present Kylo has one, and that small disk of metal, warm below his throat is the symbol of that home, and what he’s doing to earn his place there.

He looks over his crowd for another moment. He channels the Force, and uses it to make everyone in the room _feel_ his power. The ones closest to him look like they want to drop to their knees. Like it’s only the order to stand that’s keeping them upright.

Kylo smiles at that. He’s not sure if he should be ashamed of it or not, but he _loves_ the feel of this.

Then he reaches behind him and flicks the little clasp that undoes the mask. In the held-breath silence of the _Supremacy’s_ flight deck, the tiny hiss echoes.

He takes it off, setting it on the podium, and he can feel the shock wave through his troops. Whatever they expected behind the mask, a young man with dark hair and a scar across his face wasn’t it.

He keeps his voice quiet and calm, though whatever sound magic Jon has done amplifies it without changing the tone, allowing the front row, twenty or so meters from him, to hear just as well as the back row, close to two kilometers away. “I believe you know me, or at least of me. I am Supreme Leader of the First Order Kylo Ren. Sixteen months ago, Supreme Leader Snoke proved himself dangerously unsuitable for the job of ruling the First Order. He allowed his second-in-command, General Armitage Hux, a free rein, and Hux loved nothing more than death and mayhem.

“This resulted in the unfortunate destruction of far, far too many lives.

“In the days following the destruction of the Hosnian system, I set into motion a plan to remove Snoke, Hux, and many of the officers they relied upon from their positions of power. Thus ending a frightfully unstable element in our galaxy.” He pauses for a beat, watching the crowd, feeling their curiosity, with some sparks of disbelief, and a few veins of shock.

“Instability is the mark of the last three decades. Thirty-one years ago, a group of blood-thirsty terrorists turned a functioning Empire, a system legally enacted through the democratic process, into anarchy through a series of bombings and assassinations. In the years that followed the destruction of the Galactic Empire, we saw not one single day of peace. Somehow, somewhere, someone was at war in what used to be the Empire.

“Snoke saw the chaos, and knew something had to be done. He knew that the galaxy cried out for Order. For a rule of law.

“Unfortunately, for Snoke, law meant that he got to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, however he wanted, to whomever he wanted, and everyone else would just… cope.

“That definition of law attracted others who enjoyed the idea of a galaxy full of shivering slaves awaiting the next command in terror.

“Like I said, they’ve been dealt with.” A flick of his finger drops Snoke’s First Order banners. He gives it a beat, allowing them to flutter to the ground, and then, with one more motion, Kylo’s Order banners, long sheets of black, with the white circle, and sixteen rays surrounded by the white hexagon, fall in their place. “But Snoke was not entirely wrong, the galaxy does call out for Order. It does need a rule of law, but a rule of law dedicated to protecting its citizens from the dangers of chaos.

“Thus from the ashes of The First Order comes The Order.

“And The Order will exist to be what it is. Order. A stable, predictable system of governance dedicated to allowing _any_ person who joins it to flourish.

“For a system of governance to work, it has to provide some advantage to its citizens, not just its leaders. No system can long survive on terror and pain alone, though Snoke certainly sought to test the limits of how long it could endure.

“That ends, now.” He touches the badge on his sleeve. “Anyone who gives five years’ service to The Order becomes a citizen, and so will their children. If you already have your five years, as of today, you and any children you may have are now citizens. Anyone who can get to a recruiting station will be accepted into The Order. No one will be turned away. All citizens will have a collection of basic rights, including free association and free travel, the right to keep and hold any honestly gained property, legally enforceable contracts, access to a system of courts and justice, and in time, a vote. In seven years, all citizens will be offered the opportunity to vote in our first galactic elections. Every hundred thousand people will have their own representative, whom they may pick from any Citizen of The Order. The representatives will gather, discuss what would benefit the people of The Order, decide on which paths to follow, and vote on them. They will send those votes to me, and if it can be done, or should be done, I will make it happen.”

Kylo can feel the wave of disbelief aimed at him. No one expected this. They figured they were here to see him crown himself, and he’s doing it all right, but no one expected him to take up _this_ mantle. He’d like to smirk at that, but knows he can’t, not now, not when everyone is watching.

“We’ve lived in a galaxy of chaos, power-hungry warlords, terrorists claiming to be ‘for the people’ who slaughtered them indiscriminately, and megalomaniacs with death fetishes who worshiped pain.

“No more. I’ve ruled for the last year, and in that last year, this galaxy has had its first real taste of peace. There have been no major conflicts since Snoke died, and I intend to keep it that way.

“We need to focus on growing, on becoming more, and better. We need to build homes, lives, and businesses, not weapons for destroying those homes, lives, and businesses.

“Today, we start anew. Today, the past dies. Yesterday, I was Supreme Leader of the First Order. Today the First Order is gone, and there will be no more Supreme Leaders. I am Kylo Ren, Master of the Order, for those of you who wish to join me in building a bigger, better, glorious galaxy of dazzling lights and myriad wonders, welcome. It’s time we got to work.”

He offers a slight bow to the hundreds of thousands of troops and officers arrayed around him, and then strides off.

 

 

* * *

“I think that was good.” He feels flushed, jittery, nervous, but… not. The physical sensation of nervous without the mental uncertainty. He’s not sure if he likes this sensation or not. He feels an amused smile in the back of his mind along with Rey’s voice. _You’re_ excited _, Kylo._

C8 nods. “You hit every point you intended to.”

Unfortunately, lacking emotional responses means that C8 doesn’t exactly have the map of ‘good’ Kylo would find useful in this situation.

He knows who would, and aches to see her, feels her answering longing, but right now, he’s about two minutes away from a wave of officers in need of instruction and dignitaries wanting to know what happens next.

He knows that his troops are getting their new badges. All of them are getting the new image, and about three quarters of them have more than five years of service, so they are getting badges with the silver circle on them.

His officers will be getting quick primers on what it means to be a citizen. It’s not too detailed, yet, but at least the basics are down.

And anyone with more than twenty years of service are getting a pamphlet suggesting they look into retiring. He’s not going to mandate it, but he’s hoping the more of his men from the days of Palpatine and Snoke he can remove, the more the Order will be his, and the less it will be _theirs._

 

* * *

Upon suggesting that they invite people to this, it became _immensely_ clear to Kylo that Snoke and Palpatine were not, on any level, interested in the same things when it came to ruling. Beyond, of course, the most basic level of being the most powerful being in the galaxy, if not the universe.

Palpatine’s men more or less jumped up and clapped at the idea of this. Palpatine had no problem annihilating anything that didn’t want to go his way, but he preferred to at least attempt to get along diplomatically. He enjoyed working behind the scenes, setting up layer after layer of deals to move people into positions that best benefited him.

Snoke worked under the technique of asking, nicely, once, and if he didn’t get the answer he liked, he’d kill everyone involved in giving him the wrong answer, and most of the people near them. (And, sometimes, even if they said yes, he’d kill everyone near them, just to hammer home the point of what an eventual no might result in.)

But Snoke is gone, and his men grudgingly allowed that there might be some purpose to this, but really, they’ve got a big enough fleet, so wasting time meeting with people sounded boring. (And Kylo could feel them privately thinking that if he needed his ego petted by having diplomats fawning at his feet, that he wasn’t suitable Supreme Leader material.)

Palpatine’s men pointed out that this was a way to _show_ all of those people out there exactly how big and dangerous the fleet was without having to risk any of it to enemy fire, which made Snoke’s men feel a _little_ less grudging about the whole thing, but really, they’d rather be fighting than meeting. (Still, a few of them are slowly coming to the conclusion that there may be battlefields beyond a literal battlefield, and maybe it’s worth learning how to fight on them, if for no other reason than to make sure Palpatine’s men don’t take them out when they aren’t paying attention.)

So, slowly, they did come up with two thousand dignitaries to invite, and close to six hundred of them accepted the invitation. So, they came up with another two thousand to invite. Which got the total up to close to fifteen hundred. And another two thousand, and that finally got them over the two thousand mark.

For some reason, likely because no one from the Raclan Bank was ever seen again, most heads of state weren’t terribly interested in visiting Kylo, for fear that they, too would find themselves engaging in ‘involuntary displays of exuberant patriotism.’ They sent polite refusals that didn’t exactly say outright none of them would ever be insane enough to get within gun range of Kylo, but more than hinted at it.

The ones who did send emissaries sent what appears to be the second or third rank of their diplomats. The son-in-law of the third son of the Prince Consort: people they’d prefer not to lose, but are, all in all, disposable.

Kylo supposes that’s logical.

And he supposes this part of it matters. He’s here, and they’re here, supposedly because he’s changing things but… He’d pretty readily skip this part.

Major Frakes tells him that this is the important part. These people came to meet him, not just watch him take a mask off, so he’s got to _meet_ them.

What the hell he’s supposed to do as he’s meeting them, he doesn’t know, but… Meet dignitaries. Okay. He can do this.

They’re in his throne room, though he’s not using his throne. Honestly, he hates the damn thing. It’s the least comfortable chair in existence, he can’t have a decent conversation while he’s in it, and apparently in his all black, looming above the people who come to petition him, he’s so unnerving to the average person that it takes at least five minutes of them stammering and trembling before they can even get to why they came. And yes, the first few times, he rather enjoyed that, but as he’s spending longer trying to _do_ things, he’s getting less patience for people coming into his presence and immediately curling into a terrorized ball of no higher level mental functioning.

So his throne is empty, and he’s at the door, supposedly greeting people, and thanking them for coming, and on some level, answering minor questions about who he is and what he’s doing. Mostly, he’s feeling how curious they are about him, and Frakes is right, if he’s going where he hopes to go, these people need to _see_ him. Literally, lay eyes on him, and as they get more interested in him as a… celebrity, he guesses, they may be willing to _work_ with him, later.

He’s been at it for an hour when he runs into the first real issue, beyond how to make, “Hello, nice to meet you,” interesting after the third time, let alone hundredth. The man in front of him is sticking a hand out at Kylo, waiting, staring at him expectantly.

Kylo’s looking at his hand, wondering what this is.

_Take his hand!_

Kylo jerks his head, looking around, and sees Kinear, who is staring at him, intently. He knows the man doesn’t have Force skills, but apparently, when it’s important, he can think loudly.

_Why?_

_It’s polite. Take your gloves off, first. You take his right hand in yours and give it a little squeeze._

Rather than get into a discussion of why anyone would ever do this, he just does it, and takes the man’s hand, giving it a little squeeze.

The man squeezes back, harder.

Once they’re touching, Kylo can feel this is some sort of dominance game. The man who can squeeze hardest wins.

Apparently, Kinear feels or sees it, too because as he’s moving up to stand next to Kylo, _DON’T BREAK HIS HAND!_ echoes hard and sharp in his head.

However, he’s not thinking loudly enough for a non-Force sensitive person to pick up on it, or the man in front of him just doesn’t care, because he does not appear to be getting the _don’t break his hand_ message. He’s doing his best to see if he can crack Kylo’s hand.

Kylo shakes his head, done with this, and both the man and Kinear wince, hard when they hear the crack. There’s enough conversation going on that no one else hears, and the man’s eyes go wide in shock and pain as what just happened really hits him, and a tiny “Oh!” hisses out of him.

Kylo lets him go, and turns his attention to the next one in the line, tugging his gloves back on, fairly certain that he’s not going to get into stupid hand holding games again, polite or no.

The next person in line, and the one next to her, and the one down from that, also all saw what happened, and are very hastily killing any plays they may have had of offering Master Ren a hand, too.

 

 

* * *

There are facets of this he wasn’t expecting, at all.

The questions. He knew they were going to ask him things, because that’s part of meeting people, but… Where are you from? (The core.) Is that really a lightsaber? (Yes.) Did you build it yourself? (Yes.) Are you a Jedi? (No.) Why did you kill Snoke? (Because destroying an entire system on a whim is inappropriate.) Did you write his speech yourself? (Yes.) Is that your only scar? (Long unblinking stare along with a vague sense of discomfort.) How did you kill Snoke? (Touches lightsaber.) Is there a Lady Ren? (Longer, even less blinking stare with a heightened sense of discomfort.) What do you mean by myriad wonders? (Give it seven years, and let’s see where the Order wants to go.) How old are you? (Old enough.) How about we slip off somewhere private and get to know each other better? (He got asked versions of that four times, by two women, a man, and one he wasn’t sure about, and offered the same flat, “No” to each one.) Your accent is… (“Non-descript.” The correct answer is Chandrila with a layer of Alderaan on top and a few Tatooine inflections intentionally smoothed out over a decade in the First Order.) Where do you intend to set your capitol? (We’re standing in it.) What does your symbol mean? (Order moving forward, leaving the past behind.) Why free slaves? (Because I _can._ ) Don’t you worry about upsetting the galactic order? (No.) What happens if a system bans your recruiting stations? (None of them have, so far.)

And they roll on and on and on. And at no point does he ever feel _easy_ doing this, and it’s significantly more tiring than he was expecting, but… There’s something to it.

Most of them are looking at him with curiosity.

Some of them are angry or afraid.

Some of them are intensely watching him, desiring him, and not just, though there’s a level of this, too, sexually. Some of them want to see what comes next, where he’s going to go, the idea of the possibility he represents heady in their minds.

He’s never felt that before, the sensation of being watched _hopefully,_ and it’s appealing. He can see how some of Snoke’s men fear that he might keep doing things to try and get more people to look at him that way, but… That’s not how it works for him. He wants that appreciation for doing what he’s going to do, not for doing a good job of twisting himself into the shape they want.

He spends four hours at it, which he feels is as long as anyone can take standing around meeting people, before he withdraws. They’re all still milling around talking to each other, doing whatever it is diplomats do.

Spreading rumors likely, talking about what they asked and what he said, and guessing what he could have meant, where he might be from, and where they may be going.

 

 

* * *

“Did you get to see it?” he asks as soon as Rey comes through.

“On what?”

That’s a good point. She has communications software, but because she’s ‘hiding’ what she has is the ability to call out and receive information only from people she’s called. She can’t just monitor broadcasts because she doesn’t have enough antenna or a satellite for it.

“We should fix that.”

“Later. You have a copy I can see?”

He thinks about it, and then fetches a datapad. “Probably.” He messes around with it, and locates a broadcast. “I’ve got it.”

She pats the bed, and when he joins her on it, she snuggles into him… “Show me.”

He wraps his arms around her, and rests his chin on her shoulder, and then clicks on the video.

She smirks at it as he walks in tall and proud, cape billowing behind him. Then she pauses it. “You did that on purpose, didn’t you? There’s no wind on the Supremacy, you used the Force to do that.”

“I was just walking.”

“Uh huh.” She’s _skeptical_ about that. He unpauses it, and they both watch.

She nods as he takes the mask off. “Your hair’s getting too long for it.”

He shrugs. “I haven’t gotten it cut since… before I broke the first one.”

She strokes his hair, these days it rests on his shoulders, and is another few centimeters longer in the back. More than half of the time he wears it pulled back in a tidy queue. Today it’s long and loose. She prefers it that way, but certainly understands how impractical it is to just let your hair hang.

After a few lines he says, “Do I really sound like that?”

“Uh… Volume’s low, but… Yes. Isn’t that what you sound like to you?”

“No. I think my voice is deeper.”

Rey’s eyebrows shoot up at that. “Deeper?”

“That’s how it sounds to me.”

“It’s awfully deep, already.” He sends down Snoke’s banners, and she nods at that. Nods a moment later when his fall open, and from the angle of the camera he can see people react to that in a way he didn’t when he was speaking. There’s a shifting in the crowd, an almost eagerness to see what comes next.

They listen to the rest of it, and at the end Rey says, “It’s good, Kylo.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

 


	14. The Rumor Master

1/1/1 Year of the Order

 

“Well, that was interesting,” General Kinear says to his associates as they slowly meander from the rally to Ren’s throne room. They nod and murmur in agreement, all of them well aware of the fact that they are _going_ to be gathering to talk about this, later.

They’ve known for a while now that something was coming. Something _big._

You don’t get to Kinear’s level and not have an almost supernatural ability to feel the shifts in the political currents before they happen. You _can’t_ get to Kinear’s level and not have a wide and thorough group of whisper listeners scattered all throughout the organization. So, yes, he and they knew _something_ was coming, and having gotten advanced copies of both the “Rewards for long and valued service” document, and the “Citizenship and You!” pamphlet, he’s had an idea of where they were going, but…

He nods, looking old and amiable to the passersby. Yes, they are going to _talk._

 

 

* * *

It has always been true that the First Order… The Order now… has had _factions._

When Snoke began his mission, he didn’t have enough professional talent available to him, solely loyal to him, to do what he wanted to do, so he scooped up any member of the Empire willing to work for him. Since all but a handful of them had been shut out of the New Republic or were actively being hunted by it, he found recruiting easy.

A General of split loyalties and an army is more useful than no Generals and no armies. And an Admiral with a fleet of ships at his command is of much greater use than no Admiral and no ships, even if said Admiral is only hanging on to find a better position from which to maneuver his own career higher.

Snoke took what he could get. After all, he had significantly more in the ways of tools at his disposal to make sure his men behaved in a manner he approved of than the average warlord.

But, by twenty years into his rise, he’d developed his own officers, loyal to _him_ and the First Order.

This annoyed, to no end, the Imperial Officers. For several reasons, first of all, once Snoke had men he could fully depend on, he started shoving them into less and less desirable positions. And second of all, the new officers were bleeding insane.

Whatever else was true about the Empire, it was an _Empire._ It was huge. It spanned the entire galaxy, not the threadbare quarter of it they barely inhabit now. It had a long tradition, reaching well back into the days of the Republic of professional, sensible, _functional, bureaucratic_ governance.

Meaning: A: Things worked. B: Yes, there were religious fanatics, Vader chief among them, but fewer than one in a thousand of them ever came within a light year of him. C: The vast size of the Empire meant most of them were comfortable in their own commands, doing their own things, never ever having to deal with anyone higher than they were on the food chain. D: Okay, sure, there was a war going on, and those Rebels could be annoying, but many of them could go entire years without ever seeing one. And E: They were trained to be professional military men, but in most cases ‘professional military man’ meant provisional governor who made sure their section of the galaxy functioned smoothly.

Then Hux Sr. got into Snoke’s good graces and what had been a perfectly functional officer corps turned into… Land of the fanatical maniacs on a near religious crusade to purify the First Order of ‘weakness’ and spread it’s tendrils into every centimeter of the galaxy.

A properly-trained officer, one who had gone through the Imperial Academy had, among other things, enough of his brain left to make good decisions on a decision by decision basis, and they could still weigh pros and cons of a decision and render a functional cost/benefits analysis, on the fly, when and as needed and retool their plans, mid-play, if need be.

Men who went through the Hux method had all of their subtly, middle gears, and ability to function on a non-attack level stripped away.

The Empire’s men were politicians and bureaucrats. They understood that sometimes a blaster is the political tool of choice, but that words and compromise worked just as well, if not better, in most cases. Hux’s men were crusaders. They saw compromise as weakness and words as only good for rallying troops. 

And the Emperor’s men knew there were uses for ‘graduates’ of the Hux method. Any attack that required just that, an _attack:_  a show of blistering, overpowering, make-a-man’s-knees-buckle-from-the-sheer-fear-of-what’s-coming _attack,_ they were _amazing_ at. And any attack where every, single step had been planned out, _and_ the plan actually worked, so each step could be followed in order, they were fabulous. No one followed orders like a Hux man.

But they couldn’t, and wouldn’t, retreat to save their lives. (Unless directly ordered to do so.)

And they were worth bugger all at medium and long-range tactical thinking.

And none of them knew how to build an alliance. ‘Do what I say or die’ summed up the entirety of their ability to compromise.

What they excelled at was killing everything in their path and taking orders, assuming said order was, ‘Kill everything in your path.’

Which, basically, was the only reason the Emperor’s men didn’t poison more of them as they started coming into command positions. There are times and places where that’s necessary, and as long as they were the _senior officers_ and Hux Sr.’s men were the _junior officers_ all was fine.

And then it wasn’t.

There’s not a man alive, left from Palpatine’s day, who doesn’t remember waking up and finding out that the spawn of Hux suddenly outranked them all, and that his pet, the chrome encrusted terror standing by his side, was watching his back.

And a year after that, a new black-clad ghoul in a mask showed up, with a fucking red-lightsaber by his side, and… Suddenly all of the bad things of the Empire, of what happened if you had the dumb fool luck to actually be located _near_ the Emperor were back, and…

The ones who could leave, did. General Kinear, for example, suddenly developed an acute case of border raids upon his territory that desperately needed his immediate and personal attention, and he got the fuck out of the way. Send glowing reports of how well everything is going and stay 50,000 light years away from the Supreme Leader was Kinear’s technique for a long and successful career. Many of the officers currently walking from the rally to Ren’s throne room employed similar techniques.

Many of the ones who didn’t or couldn’t, died. Snoke had no intention of keeping men who may not have been entirely loyal to him a minute longer than they were necessary.

Hux Jr., who made his father look like a calm and reasonable man, took more of them out, or sent them on missions where it was clear their job was to die bravely for the cause. And he kept putting his own pets into positions of power, and within five years the officer corps had gone from 75% Imperials to 33% Imperials, and dropping.

For all the Hux method destroyed long-range tactical planning skills, it either didn’t work, or wasn’t fully used on Hux Jr. He had _plans._ Detailed plans. Carefully set up, step by step, _plans._ Snoke may have been, as best as any of them knew back then, immortal, but that didn’t mean Hux Jr. couldn’t get into a very comfortable second-in-command position.

Which he did.

With Snoke’s blessing, he moved to become the “Face” of the First Order. Snoke knew he wasn’t much to look at. He’d go years without letting anyone see him, but Hux was young, and strong, and handsome, he looked good in pictures and on broadcasts, and had a nice voice to go along with those classic good looks, so he could be the ‘image’ of the First Order.

And with his black and silver masked commanders behind him… He set exactly the right tone to keep people compliant and terrified.

Kinear remembers finding out that Starkiller had been destroyed, and praying to his god, the Force, and any and all other possible deities that might have been listening that Hux went with it. He and the rest of the Imperials who were left were fairly sure they could take care of the rest of Hux’s officer class, because they could out-think and out-flank them, as long as they got rid of Hux Jr., who had the damnable combination of being a complete sociopath _and_ paranoid _and_ good at planning.

Sheer buggeration he didn’t manage to die there.

And less than a week later the entire universe flipped over and suddenly the black clad ghoul with the lightsaber had named himself Supreme Leader Ren, which caused a new tizzy of consternation because none of them knew anything about him other than he apparently worshiped Vader and thought Hux was stupid enough to believe that the girl captive he’d brought in had disabled him, killed Snoke, and the entire Praetorian Guard, _by herself,_ and then _escaped,_ and just happened to leave a nifty little power vacuum for him to step into. So, other than a sigh of relief that Hux Jr. hadn’t stepped into the Supreme Leader role, everyone remained nervous.

And then nervous turned into shocked whiplash. Less than three months after that, Hux was _gone_ along with many of his supporters and the Ghoul had a name and a face, and was turning the First Order around so fast many of officer class just stood there, stunned and silent.

And now, they’re mingling, in a large room, with _diplomats_ and the Ghoul, who’s vastly younger than he has any right to be, and his name is _Kylo_ of all silly things, is standing there, talking to people about building a new fucking republic and…

And it’s time, for the professional, responsible, _adult_ members of the Order’s officer class to make a plan.

So plan they will.

 

 

* * *

Kinear’s been watching Ren all afternoon. Actually, he’s been watching for months, since he decided that it was time to cease his interest in his border raiders and get closer to what’s going on. Ren’s decision to move from Starkillers to Citykillers intrigued him, got him interested in what might have been under the mask.

Among other things, there’s some level of tactical training, and the understanding that bigger isn’t necessarily better. Though if some of the rumors about the S—Master are true, he would have learned that lesson at his Mama’s knee. Because if anyone _wrote_ the lesson of how to do more with less, it’s the Master’s mother.

Watching him attempt to work the crowd, it’s clear the boy has big dreams, and _no_ idea how to get to them.

Which surprises Kinear, and leads him back to those rumors. The sort of rumors one wouldn’t _ever_ repeat, especially not anywhere within earshot of anyone else in the Fir—Order. Namely, there are whispers, that when Kylo Ren suddenly appeared, with three of what would eventually be the six Knights of Ren, before he encased himself in head to toe black, that he was dressed in the browns and tans of a Jedi.

And, it’s known, among the kind of people who do things like set spies in important places and actually listen to what they had to say, that General, though back in those days she was still Senator Leia Organa-Solo had a son, who was being trained as a Jedi.

And some people, who were _extremely_ well-paid to be _exceptionally_ discreet about certain things, could be, if enough time had gone by and they were even better paid, cease to be discreet about certain things. They had hinted that Master Ben Solo had more dark in him than anyone was comfortable with, and by the age of eight had been personally responsible for five nannies and seven tutors more or less running away from the Organa-Solo household, and as a result had been sent off to his Uncle to train as a Jedi because that was the best hope anyone had of him not killing someone before he reached the age of ten.

Kinear doesn’t actually know if those rumors are true. He knows he paid good money for them, though.

And he knows that when the Ghoul in back appeared, and called himself Kylo Ren, that Snoke made it capital offense to call him anything but. Once upon a time, Kylo Ren had a name so well known that even uttering it was high treason.

Now, maybe, in a galaxy as wide and diverse as this one, there were two Ben Solos. It’s probably a common enough name. But after that, the odds of the continued similarities get awfully low.

Until today, he’s never doubted those rumors, though seeing Kylo attempt to swim in these waters, he’s boggled at the idea that the son of Leia Organa, who was nothing if not a competent politician raised by competent politicians, engaging in competent politics, doesn’t know how to, among other things, shake hands.

 

* * *

As a member of the Officer Corps with more, much, much more, than twenty years of service, Kinear’s gotten the, “Maybe now’s a good time to retire, don’t let the door slide shut on your ass on the way out,” pamphlet.

It is, of course, significantly more polite than that, but he knows the writing on the wall.

He also knows that officers who’ve even got a shot of attempting to do the sort of thing Kylo wants to are already outnumbered, and will be leaving in droves if they take this pamphlet seriously.

Kinear, watching Kylo attempt to make small talk, and blanch visibly when one of the attendees asks him if he’d like sex, sends out a discrete communique to twenty-five hand-picked members of what used to be the Imperial Officer Corps.

_No matter what, we don’t retire. Unless he flat out orders it, we’re staying. Pick you best men, spread the word. We don’t leave._

He knows they’ll talk more later, about what, exactly, they’re going to do with this, but this is the closest they’ve been to a functional government of any sort in longer than Kylo’s been alive, and he’s not about to flush that away like last night’s waste.

 

 

* * *

In the good days, which Kinear would define as Empire Day to about seventeen years later, when everything was going well, they had the Senate, and the Emperor, and the Army and Navy of the Empire, and it’s true that things were often rough around the edges, but…

But it _worked._ For the majority of people on the majority of planets in the majority of systems, it _worked._ In most of the galaxy, the Empire was, like any good government, practically invisible. Things got done on time, everyone was secure, businesses thrived because they could work with each other across a concrete system of contracts, the monetary system was solid and stable, an Imperial credit was good _everywhere_ , and for the most part things were _good._  

He’s old enough he remembers the fall of the Republic. He remembers the last thirty years of the Republic. And maybe, once upon a time, long before his great-grandparents were born, because that’s as far back as ‘living’ memory goes for him, there was a magical age of justice and peace, of prosperous traders living in harmony and everyone well-off and flourishing.

But if such a thing existed, no one he’s ever spoken to saw it.

He saw a Republic grown stagnant. A fancied up debating society incapable of doing what Ren said, offering _benefit_ to the people who lived under it. It was there to make the Senate, and the various diplomats and politicians happy. It kept them employed and busy, and to a lesser degree it kept the heads of systems content in their own power. Beyond that, the galaxy spun around it, falling apart.

Palpatine believed that it was spinning out of control, (or at least he gave speeches indicating he believed that, what he actually thought on the matter, Kinear has no idea; he made of point of never actually getting within a thousand kilometers of Palpatine.) because there was no one steering the ship. The Republic was adrift, unable to go anywhere because it had no captain.

And for seventeen years, he was the captain, and, at least to Kinear’s way of thinking, everything was significantly more effective when the Senate was married to an Emperor.

Then Palpatine went crazy, too. Or his crazy finally came out. (The Death Star was always a warning sign that he wasn’t _quite_ right in the head.) And he divorced himself from the Senate, blew up an inhabited and peaceful planet, tarred all of them with the stink of genocide, and that was the final push necessary to turn what had been a nuisance “Rebellion” into a fully functional Civil War.

Kinear developed a case of border raiders then, too. Those pesky Hutts. (Okay, yes, he was paying them out of his personal accounts to raid his border. It was a win/win situation. He got to get as far away from the rest of the Empire as possible, and Drogan The Hutt had a financially lucrative way to get rid of his annoying cousins, step-siblings, and business rivals. They’re still on splendid terms to this day, and often send each other useful tidbits of information as they find them.) As long as he kept his head down and kept sending in reports about taking care of those raiders, he was able to keep out of pretty much everything that followed the dissolution of the Senate.

He kept himself so far out of the fight that he was actually granted immunity from prosecution by the New Republic. Just being a member of the Empire couldn’t constitute a war crime, not when it’d been democratically enacted, and no one had any proof of him violating the Republic’s rules of war.

Then they generously offered him a retirement package.

And he spent an entire year retired, while the wars kicked up all around him. He _tried_ to volunteer for the New Republic, but they decided that between his previous service and his 61 years of age, that he wasn’t for them.

So he joined Snoke. He didn’t care much which side won, as long as _someone_ figured out how to run the damn thing.

He’ll admit, but only to his wife, when he’s in his own personal quarters, on his own personal command ship, and it’s been scanned for bugs in the last hour, that maybe that wasn’t the greatest idea he’d ever had.

But watching this new _Master,_ he’s thinking maybe there’s a chance to salvage this.

Assuming this man with a child’s manners can be _taught._

Though, if the rumors about his relationship with Snoke are correct, Kinear wouldn’t be shocked if Ren never wanted another teacher again.

That said, until the Jackass from Berruiin decided to up the stakes in the handshaking contest, he was at least willing to take instruction…

_From someone who wants to see him succeed._

 

 

* * *

There are perks to being the Master. After four hours, Ren can leave.

Kinear and the rest of the commanders are to meet and mingle and talk to the people they invited all night.

So he talks, and mingles, and shares drinks, and acts older and drunker than he is, and… he pays attention to the guests around him.

They’re intrigued. No one knows what to make of this new Master.

The Supreme Leader certainly promised law and order and a galaxy at peace. Palpatine did, too. So did the Republic, Old and New. Everyone promises peace and prosperity. Getting it is a different story.

His feel for the room is that most of the dignitaries fall into three main camps. A third of them are sticking around for whatever the shortest possible amount of time considered polite is, and then running home, and doing everything they can to make sure Ren doesn’t notice them, and hopefully never puts one of his recruiting stations on their planets. It’s fairly clear they do _not_ want him upsetting their status quo, and they do _not_ want to try and fight him on it. They know they’re massively outgunned, so their best hope is to hide.

A third of them see a young idealist who wants pretty rallies and people chanting his name with reverence. They assume he can be easily manipulated with flattery and the right charming words. They’re sure they’ll be able to bend him to their will and are happily plotting away, looking for how to use this new tool in the galactic political drama. Kinear has the feeling they are going to be sorely disappointed.

The final third are sure this is the same old song and dance they’ve seen before. Pretty pictures put on the same pile of shit. Kinear thinks this is possible, but he’s got the sense they’re wrong, too. He’s afraid this may be pretty pictures put on an entirely _new_ pile of shit, but he’s fairly sure this won’t be the same _old_ song and dance.

A few of them, like him, are recognizing they’re on the cusp of real change. It’s maybe ten percent of the group, and of that ten percent half of them are terrified. They already understand where this might go and how it will topple the power structures on a planetary level, which will ripple _up_ the command chain, something neither the Empire nor the Republic sought to do.

Hell, as he thinks about it, even the Rebellion didn’t try this. Instead of a bottom up change, they took the bottom and then tried to take out the top with it. With varying levels of success. If Ren keeps doing what he’s doing with his recruiting stations, he’ll just _take_ the bottom, use it for his own purposes, and leave the top to figure out how to function without it.

The final five percent, of which he considers himself one, are seeing that this is the chance many of them have been waiting for. This might, actually, finally, be someone who can really, truly _rule_ this galaxy. Someone with big ideas to guide the ship, and a willingness to marry that to the power that comes from billions, if not trillions of voices agreeing to go there.

Kinear’s not drunk. He looks it, and often does at gatherings like this, people will tell an amiable drunk things they wouldn’t normally, but he hasn’t been drunk in decades, though the almost giddy feeling that goes with the idea of what they could do with this does feel a bit like it.

 

 

* * *

First watch is wrapping up when the ‘reception’ finally dies.

Eight generals and six admirals, all the members of Kinear’s chosen twenty-five here on the _Supremacy_ , gather together at the end, wandering to a quiet bit of the F-Deck.

It’s not exactly a park. Parks aren’t a thing on the _Supremacy_ , but it’s as close as one can get. It’s an open space with benches and courts for squammath games. There are a few trees, and some planters with flowers in them.

Two of them fall into a game, heatedly, and under a vigorous and rowdy discussion of which one of them can take the other, a half-unspoken conversation about the future happens.

Hopefully, out of the earshot, and eyes, of the First Order loyalists.

Kinear starts it with, “This is it, our chance to get the Empire back, are we taking it?”

The debate lasts the length of three games, and the end result is a list fifty First Order loyalists/Palpatine’s men who were too enthusiastic about things like Death Stars and think Senates and voting are passé who are going to have _accidents_ in the next few months. Likewise, a list of ‘retired’ warriors, has been drawn up. They’re coming back, enlisting, and as soon as they’re through basic training and into their commands, those hand-picked recruits are going to be promoted. _Fast and high._

And if a year from now, the Officer Corps looks a little grayer and less trim in their uniforms, well, they are _old._ But they aren’t dead, and they’re not maniacs, and… Kinear doesn’t know if that’ll be enough to let Kylo succeed, but they’ll at least take some of the hurdles out of his way.

He does know though, they’re only giving him half of the battle. They’ve got to find someone who can gently nudge Kylo into appropriate social behavior, or this is going to fall flat before it gets off the ground, and as of right now, none of them know who that might be.

Or, as General Ritter put it, “Does he have friends? Let alone one suitable to whisper something like this in his ear?”

They all exchange looks. They’ve heard the rumors that he has a companion who visits him at night, but… None of them know who it may be. And as for _friends,_ the sort of person you may take a meal with or shoot the breeze with on a long watch… None of them have heard so much as a whisper.

Kinear says it, voice low, “Well, be _friendly_ if you get the chance. Pretend he’s one of your grandsons. He’s taken direction from me when I’ve hit him with it right. He might from you, too, just make it clear you’re actually solving one of his problems, not trying to get him to solve one of yours.”

It’s the sort of thing they all used to do. Back in the day of the Empire, step one of getting anyone to work with you was explaining why it was in his best interest to do so. There’s a little heady thrill that goes with this. Maybe, just maybe, the days of politics are back!

 


	15. ... But the Force Abides

1/1/1 Y.O.

 

Leia turns off the transmission and sags back into the co-pilot seat of the Millennium Falcon. Her breath pours out in a long, ragged sigh. And she’s honestly not sure if it’s relief or regret. The tears on her cheek make her think its regret. The sense of lightness in her heart may be relief.

He stood up there, took off the mask, an announced to the galaxy his intent to be the dark mirror of everything they’d ever dreamed for. A republic. Rights for people, not planets. Citizenship that anyone could claim. All things they wanted.

The way he talked about it, a vote, a… protector to enact those votes… That’s Alderaan’s system. Almost. But it is a mirror. The shape, the goals, the image is right, but backwards, reflected in polished obsidian. Dark and grayed out, color erased by the smooth, black glass reflecting it.

In her world, law is a function of justice, citizenship a birthright granted to any sentient being by nature of their sentience. And in his, citizenship will be a mark of service, and law will be an end unto itself.

She’s known for a long time that Ben is gone, but every reminder of it hurts. And this… the shape of Ben, clear and perfect, but without any of the light she dreamed of for him… Again, a mirror image. It’s almost like the Force is taunting her, giving her the inverted shape of everything she’s been working for.

Chewie pats her hand, and howls.

She nods. “You’re right, it could be worse.” _So much worse._ There were nightmares of Ben, too, and this is _much_ better than that.

She nods at his reply, too. “I know. Send out the call. We’ll gather at Lirium, on the beach. If he… does it. If it’s not just a show… Then the Resistance is dead.” Men will fight and die to battle grave injustice. But little petty bits? If he does this, that’s all that will be left. If he does it, they just got more than eighty percent of what they were fighting for, and she doesn’t see any way to rally them to fight for the remaining twenty. Not with guns and ships. Not if they can win with a ballot what they’re trying to obtain with guns.

He howls again, and Leia’s lips curl into a wry smile. “No, Chewie, I’m not about to run as a Senator again.” She sighs. “If he’s really cleaning house, and our spies have suggested he has, then he’ll be looking for us, too. I’m probably the top name on the list of bloodthirsty terrorists.” After all, she left the New Republic to run the Resistance, _not_ the Army of the Republic. Hux had been right about that, when he called them out right before destroying the Hosnian system. Technically the Republic was ‘neutral’ and trying to seek peace, and offered mediation between the First Order and any system it tangled with, so Leia wasn’t ‘officially’ a member any longer, but they were winking at her, trying to have it both ways. Get rid of Snoke and keep their hands clean.

Things like that kept the First Order in recruits, and the Resistance, too. People will join a group, right or wrong, if it offers a clear, easy, black and white version of reality. And whatever else was true about the Republic, the only black and white bits were campaign slogans and policy speeches designed to make whomever stood against the policy look like a monster.

More howling from Chewie.

“I’m sure you’ll be on there, too. He wouldn’t forget you.”

He adds a few more sounds.

She shakes her head, looking at the frozen image of her son, standing tall, in front of his own empire. The empire he’s opening to anyone who wants to join him. She has an inkling of a feeling, something he didn’t say, but she senses, knows from his eyes and his history: this will be an empire of allegiance, not conquest. “I don’t know. I’ve been doing this my whole life. If there isn’t a government to fight, or a government to build… I don’t know.”

Chewie replies.

Leia snorts a laugh. “Sounds like something an old person does. Retire to a school and teach children how to… What? Not like I ever learned how to float rocks. Only thing I was ever really good at was lost causes and hopeless fights.”

Chewie makes sure she’s looking at him, not the holovid of Ben before saying, _Then teach them how to preserver, and when to fight to the last man, and when to retreat for another go at it._

Leia nods, and squeezes his hand. He’s not wrong, but the lesson she needs now, what to do when there’s nothing more to persevere for, when the last man is spent, is something she never learned.

 

 

* * *

They hurtle though the sky, getting closer and closer to Lirium. And as the Falcon eats up the light years, she feels her will leaching away.

She felt it when Han died. Felt his light go out, and knew why it did. She felt Luke fade back into the Force. She felt it when Wedge died. When Mon Mothma’s final echo went silent, she felt that presence leave the back of her mind. She knew the day Lando’s light went out. She watched Holdo flame out to protect them. She felt Ackbar’s silent scream as all of the air went pouring out of his lungs and his body depressurized. She’s been bound to these people since she was young, and fate may have spread them far and wide, but it never severed that bond.

Not until death severed them, snuffing out their light.

She closes her eyes and sags a little, feeling like her light just went out, too.

If he really does let them choose for themselves… If he gives them a republic that really represents them...

That’s it. There’s nothing left to fight for.

Her whole life has been spent working to this moment, and her son is delivering it, and instead of triumph, she wants to curl into a ball and cry.  

 

* * *

1/3/1

They’re the first ones on the beach. Chewie and Finn set up camp. Rose is working on her unending battle to keep up with the maintenance on the Falcon, muttering about how the only thing worse for the ship than sand would be to land in the middle of the ocean.

Leia wanders through the dunes. Tomorrow, the next day, they’ll all get here. But tonight it’s just the four of them.

Really though, tonight is just her. She doesn’t much want company, and her companions understand that.

Maybe. She doesn’t want _their_ company.

She sits on one of the dunes, and looks at the ocean, seeing the green sun sinking below the horizon. She feels him behind her, and off to the left. “Why do you never pop up in front of me?”

“I did it on Crait.”

“I suppose.”

Luke sits next to her. “I told her it wouldn’t work out the way she expected.”

“She told me that, too.” She has the image of the Master of the Order in her mind. “It’s not what I was expecting.”

“I know. I wasn’t expecting this, either.” He wraps a glowing arm around her. She can see it, but not feel it. “Maybe we should have. We both felt it, before he was born.”

“Not like this.” Of all the possible futures of Ben Solo, _this_ wasn’t one either of them saw.

“No. But maybe we should have. When was a ruler, let alone a great one, ever part of the Light?” At least as the Jedi taught it, the Light was about _service,_ not ruling.

Leia looks so tired. “Luke, there’s not supposed to be _a_ ruler. He wasn’t supposed… It’s supposed to be—“ Too many dreams, all whispering away.

Luke shakes his head. “That’s not what either of us saw for him.” Darkness, light, greatness, power. They saw that, saw a lot of it. Where it would go? There was always a sense of dread with that, and as the last few years showed, that dread wasn’t unwarranted.

Though it may have been a low period in a much longer arc than either of them imagined.

She closes her eyes and turns away from him.

“We knew he’d be great. How could he have not been? You, Anakin, Han… how could all that mix together and not be _great?_ But we never knew how.”

Luke isn’t wrong about that. “Great is a double-edged blade.”

Luke nods. Leia’s right about that. Palpatine and Vader were undeniably great, too.

She looks up at the stars starting to peek through the second twilight of Lirium. She feels it now, and has a sense that this time, it will work out the way she expects. This time, the lines, the futures, are clarifying, coalescing. “He’ll do it. It’ll be Palpatine all over, but... Palpatine without the Dark rotting his brain. He’s not light…That was lost to him decades ago, but his dark is leaching away, too. I can feel that. He’s… balancing… I guess.” She sighs, still not liking the idea that balanced Force means light _and_ dark. Dark is the enemy. Dark killed her world. Killed her birth mother, killed the mother who raised her and the planet she called home, and her friends, and her loves, and her husband, and the dream of her son, and… Dark… Asking her to accept _Dark_ is the bridge too far. “He won’t be evil enough for anyone to muster a fight, but he won’t be good. What he builds… It will last, until one of them kills him and steps into his place, and we’ll…” She shakes her head, feeling that future line snuff out. “He’ll build it up, make it strong, kill us off by being _good enough_ to not fight. No one sacrifices themselves over tax policy and import duties…” She’s staring off into the ocean, feeling other future lines coming together. “They won’t kill him. They’ll try, but he’ll have the advantage of being able to _feel_ the danger coming. So he builds it up even stronger, and the one after him, maybe he keeps to it, but the one after that…” She can feel it, a hundred years, at least. “Sooner or later, one of them will let the power to go to his head, and there’ll be nothing left to stand up against him and…”

“I know, Leia.” And he does. He can feel it, too. This will last, but not forever. “Your great-grandchildren will rise up, and tear down what he’s building when the wrong person gets control of it. But you won’t see it, and I’ll be gone by then, too.”

“The Old Republic lasted a thousand generations.”

Luke rolls his eyes. Yoda and Ben have had some things to say about the Old Republic over the years. “The Old Republic was always fighting itself. It lasted because no one could gain too much power.”

“That was the idea, Luke! Always shifting alliances making sure no one could fully take over. Balance, real balance, none of this… dark shit. Balance among people and power groups. Not, seeking a treaty with evil.”

He supposes that could have been the design instead of a flaw. “I guess.” Balance that didn’t actually make anything different or better.

She rolls her eyes at that, feeling her brother’s thoughts. The politician and the philosopher, unlikely to ever see eye to eye on this.

She looks away from him, stares at the sunset with longing.

Luke glares at her. “None of that.”

“Why not? Everything I’ve ever lived for just vanished. My fight is over. My loves are dead. Everyone I sacrificed over fifty years, fighting to build, preserve, and then build again, a galaxy based on justice and respect and… It’s _over._ ” She swallows hard at that, feeling her voice go ragged. “He’s going to replace justice with law,” _That’s_ an open wound. It’s the actions of everything they valued, without any of the spirit. “and most people can’t tell the difference between them, and the ones who can… They’re not going to fight and die for the difference, not when they can put their heads down and just abide, live peacefully, and get along well-enough.” She looks to Luke. “You faded off into the sunset when you were done, why not me?”

Luke looks at her, eyes dark, searching, “Tell me what you feel, what you really feel. Are you done?”

“I want to be,” her voice is harsh, and there’s a timbre Luke’s seldom heard from her in it, fear.

“I know.” His face is kind. He knows all about wanting to be done, but not being done. He spent years begging the Force to take him, and for years it wouldn’t. “But are you?”

“No.” And she knows it. Feels the bitter herb in her mouth. Tastes the regret and resolve. They were born the day the Rebellion began, and she’s not done until this fight is done. And it’s not done until she’s done the one thing she’s never been willing to before. The one thing that scares her more than anything else. Concede defeat.

“So, no letting go until you’re done. We’re not going anywhere. When you’re actually done, we’ll be waiting.”

 

 

* * *

1/5/1 Y.O.

They drift in slowly, over the course of two days.

Leia’s got the feeling that part of going slowly is that they all know they’re going to a funeral, and maybe if they go slow, they can pretend what’s dead isn’t dead. But eventually all 36 of them who’d survived Crait, and close to 150 of the new recruits have gathered. As many as could or would come.

Finn’s asked if they’re going to get Rey, bring her, but Leia shook her head at that. “She’s already left this path for her own one. We’ll leave her to it. And maybe, after… You and Rose and Chewie can keep helping her with it.”

Finn’s eyes are bright at that. “Rose, and Chewie, and _you,_ and I.”

Leia doesn’t respond to that. She stands up, surrounded by fires and friends… well… strangers, actually. She hasn’t even met more than two thirds of them, but they’re all looking at her like she’s the hero in a myth come to life. Like she can come up with some rousing speech and give them… something… A villain, a true, black as midnight, _villain_ to fight. A new Snoke wrapped in Palpatine with a coating of Vader on top of him. A foe to righteously vanquish.

And all she’s got is… _Kylo_ , and reports of citizenship and freed slaves and voting rights and recruiting stations.

They go quiet when they see her standing there, and wait, breath held.

Her eyes are burning. “I’m not going to order any of you to stand down, but… we’re beaten.” There’s a roar of disbelief at that, and she shushes them. “We fought to restore the Republic, and if he’s really going to do it…”  She’s crying as she says it. “Then what are we fighting for?”

It doesn’t look like that’s the sort of thing any of them have ever thought of. Looking around further, besides Chewie, she’s the oldest person here. Oldest human. Again, besides Chewie, none of them, herself included, even remember the Old Republic, and almost all of them were born after the New Republic began to shatter.

Most of them don’t know what they’re fighting for, other than to hit, and hit hard, the First Order.

“That was the goal. That was what we took up arms for. To restore a galaxy of rights and laws, ruled by the people, for them. If you’re not in the system, it’s time to enlist, get your five years, get out, and then vote. Run for office. Become the leaders we wanted, inside of the system, and shape it to our liking.”

A lot of them do _not_ like that suggestion, at all. They want to raise up arms and tear the system down, not build a new one, especially not one helmed by anyone who had anything to do with Starkiller or the First Order.

“My father, Bail Organa served in the Senate under Emperor Palpatine until he was murdered in the genocide of Alderaan. He was the conscience of the Senate. He could always be relied on to vote for justice, for tolerance, and for a better galaxy.” She sniffs, voice breaking. “And he stayed in, because, like it or not, Palpatine was the voice of the Republic. He was _elected._ And he swore, when he became a Senator, to play by the rules of the game. But he was a realist, too. He knew Palpatine was trouble, and he knew that there would be a day where inside the system wouldn’t be enough, but for outside the system to triumph, it would need people inside it.

“We are being offered a new Republic. And if we can be citizens, instead of subjects, and have a voice in our own governance, without having to fight to do it… We’re honor bound to join. Otherwise, we are terrorists.

“And, if the shiny new Republic we’re being offered isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, if we have members inside it, we’ll be better placed to fight it, later.

“We know what we fought for,” though she’s fairly sure she’s saying that for herself, and Chewie, two droids, and the slew of ghosts behind her, “we have a peaceful route to get it, and as long as that is true, we can’t not take it.”

Her lips are trembling as she says it. “On Crait, Admiral Poe said we are the sparks that will light the fire that will burn the First Order down. Kylo Ren took the First Order down himself. So, it’s time to start new fires. Extending citizenship. Putting limits on what Ren can do. Increasing the power of the senate. If he won’t work with us, we can take up arms again but…” She inhales, sharp and shaky. “But I’ve known him from before he was born. I felt him grow inside my body, and if there’s one thing that’s ever been true about Ben Solo… or…” her voice cracks, “Kylo Ren, as he calls himself now, he will always do what he says he’s going to do.”

That revelation causes silence to fall throughout what’s left of the Resistance. Besides Chewie , two droids, and Poe, no one knew what had happened to Ben Solo. Of course, beyond Chewie, two droids, and Poe, almost everyone left in the Resistance hadn’t been with it long enough to remember a time when Leia talked about having a son.

Leia swallows hard. “I am officially disbanding the Resistance. I’ve been honored to serve with each and every one of you, and… no matter where you go from here, may the Force be with you.”

She sits down, and the arguing begins, loud, angry, shocked, mourning, after a few moments, Leia withdraws from it, going back into the Falcon, sitting in the cockpit, staring at the bonfires, letting confused and angry voices blur into the background.

Luke comes again to sit next to her. She inhales a shaky breath, and looks out over the beach. “They’re just going to squabble, and then go their separate ways.”

He nods.

“And I can’t stop them, and I can’t lead them, not any longer. I was fine with being a rebel, but I won’t be a terrorist.”

He nods again.

She sets up the communication, her own code, and in her own voice, broadcasts, “This is General Leia Organa, Commander of the Resistance. As of five days ago, Master of the Order, Kylo Ren set in motion a plan to restore a Democratic Republic governed by the will of its citizens. That is all the Resistance has ever fought for. As of today, The Resistance is officially disbanding. May the Force be with us all.” She hits the button, and from the Millennium Falcon her words spread through the galaxy.

She blinks, eyes hot, tired. She extends a hand to her brother, and he takes it. “I’m done now.”

He smiles at her. “Yes.”

And Leia fades into the Force.

 

 

* * *

A thousand meters away, Chewie sits on the beach, wondering what to do next.

He and Leia never exactly loved each other. They both loved Han, and when things were going well, that was enough.

They both hated the Empire, and when things were going badly, that was enough, too.

But when it came to just the two of them… They were fairly indifferent to each other.

She was the person his favorite human adored. He was willing to put up with, and fight beside, and support her because Han loved her. But he wasn’t heartbroken when they went their separate ways. And he wasn’t exactly thrilled to get pulled back into this shit, _again_ but… She always made sure he got paid first, and he couldn’t spit on Han’s memory by not offering her help when she needed it.

And since Crait, she’s _needed_ it.

And now, on the beach, _months_ after when he would have called it quits, he can feel that she doesn’t need his help any longer. Doesn’t need anyone’s help anymore.

And he doesn’t know how to feel about that. The only other person, because while droids never forget, they also never _understand,_ who _remembered_ Han, in all of his Han, who knew the man under the veneer, and who loved him anyway, is gone.

He howls, low and mournful, over the ocean.

 

 

* * *

Two thousand kilometers away, Rey looks up from the plasteel wall she’s setting into place with the Force. Her eyes close, and she nods, feeling it, and like with Luke, she can feel a sense of deep peace.

But knowing Leia Organa went easily into the Force doesn’t stop the tears from forming. The children around her want to know what just happened, but Marrok can feel she’s very sad, and he hushes them.

 

 

* * *

A thousand light years away, Kylo Ren drops his training saber, an aching thrill coursing through his body, leaving his fingers and toes numb. The droid he’s working with strikes him. The power of the next hit, where Kylo slams it into the wall with the Force, destroys it, scattering broken, sparking electronics across his training gym.

A moment later, C8 hurries in with five of his top generals. “Master Ren… There’s been a communication. It’s genuine, the codes check out. It’s… important, sir.”

Kylo blinks; he already knows what’s about to play.

He forces himself to calm, forces his eyes to stay dry, and his face to stay stoic. He nods, and C8 plays the message.

He inhales sharply, listening to his mother’s last words, and he knows in his heart and bones, that that’s what he’s listening to. He can feel the hole in the Force, where Leia Organa’s energy belongs, and is now empty. His eyes close, and he bites his lip, hard, before grinding out, “Leave me.”

C8 would be confused if he could be, but he’s well-programmed and doesn’t linger, asking questions. His generals are confused, but they can feel that they are not needed here, not right now.

As soon as they’re out, Kylo’s knees go out from under him. He collapses to the floor, and he starts to sob.

A moment later, a pair of hands are on his shoulder, and a soft body is behind him, holding onto him as he cries for everything lost by winning.

“Shhhh…” Rey whispers to him. Not trying to quiet him down, just looking to make a soothing noise.

He curls into her, and she gently rocks him, letting him sob for all of it. For every burnt, hot, sad, lost, envious, abandoned feeling left in him. For the victory he didn’t want to win. For the death he knew would happen during his lifetime, but he hoped he’d never know about.

“She’s gone!”

She kisses his forehead. “I know, love. I know.”

 

 

 

* * *

There are rumors, that when the Resistance surrendered, that Master Ren took the news in silence, and then barred himself into his private room for three days, seeing no one, taking no food.

It is a fact that when he was seen next, there was a certain sharp, hollow quality to his interactions with everyone around him.

But any experienced commander knows, when you’ve fought long and hard against an enemy, winning can leave you feeling a bit lost and hollow. They don’t poke him about it. And no one suggest any sort of victory celebration.

After all, it doesn’t do to gloat.

Besides, this new Order is about moving forward, and the Resistance is the past, not worth their time or attention, not anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I’m fairly comfortable saying this is the most controversial chapter I’m going to write in this installment of the Tao of the Force series. And while I prefer to just let what I write stand, I know I’m gonna get comments on it, (and yes, please do comment, I’m just letting you know how I got here.) So… here are my thoughts:
> 
> Judging by the comments in the previous chapters, a lot of you were hoping Leia would eventually be the person to help guide Kylo toward being a ruler. 
> 
> And, I’m not saying we won’t get some of that with this. (After all, no one is ever really gone.) But…
> 
> Okay: I write genre fiction, and I write to tropes as well. This, like most of my stories, is a hero’s journey on steroids. For the hero’s journey to work, the mentor has to die. At some point, the hero has to stand on his own. So, no matter what, at some point in this series of stories, Leia has to die. That’s just the rules of the game, and yes, I am playing the game. 
> 
> So, there’s the structural reason.
> 
> Character reason: This one is harder to deal with, mostly because Lucas screwed the proverbial pooch on the prequels. Palpatine is elected, cleanly, into his position by a democratic republic. And, until New Hope, the senate is still in play, and they have not removed him. So, not to put too fine a point on it, but by the laws of basically any country on earth, the Rebellion is a terrorist organization. (Rogue One gives us extra glimpses of this as we get into some of the less ‘glamorous’ sides of things.) 
> 
> Bail Organa, and Leia are, by using their diplomatic credentials to allow them to spy, violating most of the rules of war, and… (Yeah I get it, you hate this, I do, too, but…) by having done it, they’ve made Alderaan a legitimate target. (Not that blowing up the whole planet is legitimate, but you don’t get to run the rebellion out of a place and then claim it’s ‘peaceful.’)
> 
> And then Abrams seems to have doubled down on it. Thirty years later, Leia is the leader of the Resistance, not the Army of the Republic. I think that’s significant. Until the First Order blows it out of the sky, the Republic is not at war with the First Order. (At least, not at any level that we, the movie-going audience can see.) Whatever the hell it is the First Order is up to, it’s not so bad that a Republic Leia more or less formed herself, will vote to go to war against it. 
> 
> We open the movies with Senator Organa having left the senate to run her own military organization to go against the First Order. (What this says about real world geopolitics is something I find interesting, but… Anyway, we’re not talking real world.)
> 
> So, what does Leia stand for? We know she spent time building a New Republic, but… obviously, when a republic decides it’s not going her way, she’s got no problem buggering off and raising arms against it. So, I don’t think in good conscious I can call her a democrat. But, I also don’t think she thinks of herself as anything else. I suppose it’s possible she thought of the Republic as a panacea. But I have a hard time imagining her being that naïve.
> 
> My best guess, and you’ll see it through this, is an awareness of, and terror toward, the Dark. I’ll explore more of this later, bits and bobs throughout, but… the best I can tell is that The Republic, and all of the democratic trappings are a cover for her to fight against the Dark Side. I honestly don’t think she really cares all that much about the actual politics, as long as the Dark Side isn’t part of the equation.
> 
> The personal is political, no? And there's no one we see in this entire story more wounded by the Dark Side than Leia Organa-Solo.
> 
> So… the above chapter, and the previous one on the beach with Rey in Tension/Balance. She’s not going to just hop on board the-dark/light-let’s-balance-things-out train. 
> 
> She can’t. Fifty years, everyone who’s ever mattered to her, more lives than she can count, ships, and planets, and credits, and… If she joins into anything that encourages the Dark, she’s burned all of that for nothing. 
> 
> Anyway, that’s my read on Leia, and how we got here. Feel free to fire away with your own reads. For reference, I’m using the movies as canon. I haven’t read the books, so if there’s some sort of tidy explanation of the political machinations of Leia Organa-Solo, I’ll be happy to hear it, but I think sticking to the movies is cleaner.


	16. Glow

1/5/1 Y.O.

 

Rey takes Kylo back to Lirium, where he can be as loud, and as destructive, as he wants to.

Without having to worry about what his men think.

Without having to make decisions. She takes the comm he wears on his wrist off of him, and turns it off, trusting in the Force that the Order isn’t going to implode if he’s out of contact for a few days.  

For right now, the only thing he has to do is mourn. And that’s enough.

 

* * *

There are some small people who are very curious about the crying they can hear coming from her cottage, but she tells them that her friend lost his mother, and that he needs a place to be sad for a little while.

Half of the children don’t remember their mothers, but the ones who do go solemn, nod at her, and make sure the other ones don’t poke her friend.

 

* * *

The first night he sleeps. He cried himself out with Rey, and she didn’t press or try to stop him when he left, after the suns set, and found a pile of rocks to break. Too much sorrow, too much anger, too much to bear without lashing out. By the time he drug himself back to her cottage, he was spent.

She rubbed the bruise salve she has on his hands, and bandaged them up, letting her light slip through him, helping to mend crushed capillaries and torn skin, and kept close enough so that he had a gentle touch when he wanted one.

He hit the bed and slept like the dead through what was left of the night and much of the next day.

 

* * *

“Rey… If the people we love are never really gone… Why does it hurt so much when they go?” Magiit asks.

Every day Rey makes sure they get an hour or so in the chapel, just thinking and talking. Any and all questions are open for discussion. This is probably Rey’s favorite hour of the day with the children. And they seem to like it, too, because she’s happy to listen to their answers, and never makes them feel too young or too stupid when they come up with something.

(Though, sometimes, with some of the more long-winding answers that the little guys come up with, there is a general sense that maybe getting to a point sooner rather than later might be of value. But when the point eventually comes, it won’t be blown off.)

Rey feels that question, and the structures it’s based off of.

“Our loves are always with us. In our heads and spirits, and in the case of our parents and grandparents, in our literal skins. But… when they die, they’re _gone,_ too.

“When you’re desperately lonely, the feel of someone isn’t enough. You want them, there, in front of you, breathing with you, taking up your space. You want their touch and smells and sounds. And memories just aren’t enough.”

She offers Magiit a weak smile and looks to the other children.

“There’s a dismissive side to ‘they’re always with you,’ too. Sometimes people will say that as a way to deflect how you feel. Or they’ll use it as a way to try and manipulate your feelings, to try and make you put your hurt and longing aside. Sometimes they’re trying to be kind to you. They see you sad and want you to not be sad. So, with the best of intentions, they try to shape the story, and use that to shape your feelings.

“Sometimes it’s selfish. You’re sad and lonely, and that makes them uncomfortable. They don’t want to deal with you being sad and lonely, so they try to make you _not_ be sad and lonely around them. They tell you there’s no reason to mourn, because, after all, no one’s really gone.

“And that’s… bantha fodder. People leave. Your loves will, sooner or later, leave you. That’s just part of being mortal. And the promise of forever, the feel of their memories, their ghosts… It’s not enough. Not when the burn of loss is fresh. Eventually, there’s peace, and the wounds heal, and memories and ghosts will be enough. But not at first.”

“We’re… meant to be sad, then?” Halee asks.

Rey nods. “I think so. Sadness, pain, anger… If we weren’t meant to feel these things, we wouldn’t feel them. The Force doesn’t make mistakes. It doesn’t give you feelings you aren’t meant to have. Dealing with them, understanding them, learning how to feel them and not be swallowed alive by them, learning to be in them, and then go through them, that’s what we’re doing, but no one has any right to try and take them from you, or tell you you shouldn’t feel them.”

 

 

* * *

When they finish that talk session, and the children are working on making sure the faviers get their afternoon exercise, she heads back to her cottage, and curls onto her side, back tucked against Kylo, feeling him, here, and now, and real.

And tries not to imagine a time where he’s just… not. She doesn’t succeed in that, because in the end, there’s always, always an end. And one day, they too, will end.

 

 

But she doesn’t wake him up, so that feels like, maybe, a partial victory.

And if it’s clear she was crying when they reconvene to make dinner, well, right now, her home is a home that mourns, and tears are a common occurrence in such situations.

 

 

* * *

Kylo wakes up in time for supper, but doesn’t eat. Food feels like ash in his mouth and tastes of death.

The suns drop. He hasn’t done anything all day. He’s not tired, at least, not the sort of tired that results in sleep. When full night comes, he pulls on his clothing, and heads out again, a dark-edged shape in a starlit night.

He feels pulled to Rey’s chapel, so he goes, settling himself in the center, kneeling, trying to quiet his mind, trying to find his peace again.

_Ben… You can’t do that. Ben, you musn’t… Ben, that’s bad… Ben, we have to go… I’m sorry, Ben… It’s important, Ben… I know, I wish I could be home, too, Ben… Ben, you have to fight it. Ben, you can’t let it win. Ben… Your Uncle Luke will know what to do…. Ben…_

It doesn’t work. Hasn’t for a while, but today… His mantra, his liturgy for a restless mind, his focusing charm, the words that made anger go from a wild rage into a tight flame… Today, they’re useless.

He built it up over the years, condensed it down, made sure the voices that disapproved, the ones that sought to shun him, or hurt him could ring out over and over. And now they’re all gone.

Every single one of them rendered silent by death.

 _Through victory I gain freedom…_ That was a mantra, too. And maybe there was truth there. He won. Won all of his battles. And now… his hate is leaking away. It’s not there to power him, not there to guide him, or carry him, or…

And maybe that’s freedom, but it’s the freedom of a drifting ship out of fuel.

 

 

* * *

“Ben…” he can hear her voice so clearly.

There never was a Ben… But that’s not true. There never was a… whatever it was they wanted. That version of a person: the kind, light, _good_ Ben… He never existed.

But there had been a child, and he answered to a name, and that name was Ben.

And that child loved his mommy and daddy, and he wanted them to love him. He wanted to spend time with them, and he wanted them to approve of him, and he wanted them to look at him with smiles and joy and…

And he knows it happened, sometimes.

He knows there were good times.

In eight years, he can remember… four or five times when all three of them were together. Swimming at the beach, and they went to Lando’s wedding, he remembers that, and… There were some good times. Some really good ones.

But he remembers fear. And he remembers goodbyes. And _Ben, don’t cry. We’ll be back, soon, sweetheart._

And eventually he didn’t cry. When they could see. But the better he got at not crying, the worse he got at not scaring them, and everyone around him.

And eventually _Ben… You have to learn to control this. You can’t give into it. Uncle Luke can help. You’ll learn to be a Jedi and… this… will just be a learning experience._

He kneels on the floor, in the center of the spiral, feeling the stones digging into his knees and feet. There’s no solace here. No peace. His repetitions were, if nothing else, familiar, and familiar brings comfort, but not today.

Nothing touches it, today.

 

 

* * *

He feels her, senses her presence, sees the light in the chapel shift, glow blue, and looks up.

Then he stands up, pads across the chapel to her, and looks down… She’s more than a head shorter than he is. His eyes close, and he feels the tears starting.

It’s stupid, but real, and it’s out of his mouth before he can stop it. “You were taller than I was the last time I saw you, in person.”

“I know.”

“Was it worth it? Did you get what you wanted? Build your important things?”

“No.” She’s looking up at him, eyes tracing the face she hasn’t seen since Crait, and not for almost a decade before that. “Did you need to hear that?”

“Yes.” His voice cracks on that and he nods. “I did.” That comes out shaky, and he’s got to sniff, hard after saying it.

“I am so sorry.”

He’s crying harder. “Good.”

Ghosts can’t touch, but he has the sense of her hand against his face, and he leans his cheek into it.

“Why did you come?”

“To look at you, and truly see you, at least once.” Her eyes are still searching his face.

He’s staring down at her, eyes dark, hair wild, scar catching the shadows, deepening in the dim light of the stars and his mother’s glow. “Am I the monster who kept you up at night? The future you didn’t want to think of?”

 

 

“Not anymore.”

He nods at that, too. Inhaling, deep and shaky. He bites his lip, hard, but he has to ask.  “Have you seen him?”

She nods.

“Tell him…” He doesn’t know how to finish that. So much of all of his hate for Han has leaked out of him over the last year. So much of all of his hate is leaking away.

“You’ll tell him yourself, when you’re ready, Kylo. He’s always around, somewhere.”

Kylo nods, and Leia fades away from him.

 

 

* * *

There was a boy, and he had a name, and that name didn’t fit him. He tried to make it fit. He pulled it and stretched it and squished it and… And it was never right.

So he pulled himself, and stretched himself, and squashed himself, and it still didn’t fit.

And every time he tried to shift himself, the name fit less and less, and the more angry he got about having to fit that name.

And his mother loved that name, and she feared the name he’d take for himself.

And his father hoped that, if he was let to run a little wilder, he’d eventually burn off the name he’d choose for himself and settle into the name that didn’t fit. But his father also had a name that didn’t fit, General, and he too was uncomfortably trying to shove himself into a mold made for someone else.

And kneeling on a hard stone floor, filled with the memories of the boy, he can see his rage, remember it, but he can’t feel it. 

There is a saying that you aren’t truly dead until the last person who remembers your name is gone. He’s not sure about that. He remembers, but he can’t feel it, know it, not any more.

Kneeling on the hard stone, Kylo Ren knows that not only is Leia Organa gone, but so is Ben Solo.

 

 

* * *

“Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.”

He kneels on a hard stone floor, (when he finally stands, his knees will be bruised) staring up at the sky on a planet he doesn’t even know the name of, wearing the token of a religion he’s the second ever member of, on his sixth day as the Master of a new government.

The past is dead. He’s killed it, literally and figuratively.

Before him, there’s only future.

 

 

* * *

He rises, legs stiff, limping a little because both of his feet are asleep. The green sun is just starting to crest the plain as he moves through Rey’s town.

He hasn’t seen too many sunrises. It’s just not a thing on a ship, and when he sleeps somewhere with a day/night cycle, his body rapidly shifts into sleeping through the later part of the night into the morning.

And he’s fairly sure he can’t see too many of them, not here.

Not now.

Here, now, he’s a feature of the night. A dark shape in a dark space. But the sun is coming for him, caressing over his skin, a warm green that he’s not exactly used to, but doesn’t find unpleasant.

Maybe one day, he’ll greet the sun openly, here.

Maybe one day, he won’t fear showing his face to Rey’s town, friends, family…

Maybe.

 

 

* * *

He touches the door to her cottage, but of course, it’s unlocked. He’s the only one who ever locks it, and he only locks it to keep the outside from coming in, when he’s in there.

He knows her day is starting soon, but not yet. He quiets his moves, because she’s shifting from deep sleep to waking sleep, and he doesn’t want to startle her. It doesn’t take long to pull off his clothing and boots. Then he carefully slips into bed with her, snuggling up behind her.

He should have known it wouldn’t work. Her eyes don’t open, but she asks, “Did it help?”

He bows his head to her shoulder, inhaling her morning scent, and feeling her hair against his face. “I don’t know.”

She squeezes his arms, and presses back against him. “Did it hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Good hurt?”

“Probably.” No one knows better than the man who trained in both the dark and the light that, sometimes, you need to go through pain to get to something important.  

He cuddles her, looking at the sunlight stretching across them, dimmed by the curtain, but not shut out. He feels her skin against his. Since they’ve been sleeping together, neither of them has found any reason to wear pajamas. He feels the shift of her breath, the slight thrum of her heart, and the glow of her life.

He’s rarely given much thought to his own life force. It’s just a thing that is. Something he takes for granted, though he assumes, that like everyone else, he’ll one day find himself without it.

Right now, though, he’s very aware of it, feeling his own breath, own pulse, and own glow, dim though it may be.

And right now, lying in bed with her, he’s very aware of the future, and how this, here, his body and hers, combine to create that future. How their literal, physical _lives_ combine to shift and form the vague images in his mind.

His shaft rises against her, and he’s almost confused as to why, this isn’t sexual... It’s a morning cuddle, both of them with solemn hearts. She’s not in his arms, calling his name or stroking him. So, it’s not sex… Except it is. It isn’t erotic. It is sexual because that’s how his _body_ understands life. Rising against her, that’s how his body seeks the future and more life.

She notices he’s poking her, for the first time in a few days, and rubs against him, encouraging.

He smiles against her shoulder and gives her a little rub, too.

She shifts her leg, scooting back against him, and he rocks his hips, adjusting a bit, and then slips against her. He’s not entirely hard, and she’s not especially wet, so for a bit they’re just rocking against each other. Eventually though… Slow, easy, gentle, a centimeter at a time. His body seeking hers, seeking life and a future and… more of this glow of living. And he knows it can’t happen, the preventative takes care of that, but his body doesn’t, and he’s content to go with it. The motions feel good. The desire for it is real.

His body, hers. His life, hers. This motion, this slide and glide. And not today, but one day, this will be real, and it will result in a life, and a future, and another glow.

 

 

* * *

A rumor spreads across the settlement at Lirium, one child to another, that when Rey’s friend went to the chapel to meditate, it glowed blue.

 


	17. Purpose

1/6/1 Y.O.

 

“Now what, Admiral Dameron?”

Poe’s heard versions of that question more or less non-stop since Chewie started howling, and everyone realized no one had seen Leia for hours, and then they found the pile of clothing in the co-pilot’s seat, and…

“Stop calling me _that,_ ” he snaps. The only _what_ he wants right now is the time and space to go cry until he can drink, and then drink until he can’t remember why he’s crying, and then, and only then, deal with all of these people who expect him to _lead_ them.

 _Leia is gone._ He’s been with her for almost twenty years now. Seventeen-year-old hot shot newbie pilot assigned to her security detail back when she was a senator. That’s how they met. He was star struck for a few minutes, until she opened her mouth and told him a wicked joke, and all of the tension and nervous and _am I good enough for this_ melted away.

When she left the Senate, he went with her. When she began calling people to arms, he was the first one by her side.

He’d have flown to the end of the galaxy for her.

He mutinied against the only thing that mattered to him because he was sure Leia wouldn’t approve of what Holdo was doing. 

And now she’s gone, and he’s never, ever, felt _less_ like a commander. But he’s got followers, who are looking for a leader and… He doesn’t exactly like Leia’s plan. He loved _her_ ; he didn’t always love her plans, though over the years he noticed that she tended to make good ones. But, enlisting if you can and then running for office sounds like something he could _never_ do. Even if he weren’t, now, the highest ranked living member of the Resistance, and therefor probably on the top of the Order’s shoot on sight list. Hell, he was bad at following orders for a group he wholehearted agreed with and believed in. Doing it for The Fir—Order, as if that’ll make much difference, sounds like being asked to gouge his own eyes out.

He rubs his forehead, eyes finding Finn, imploring him. Maybe… if he had the two of them… Finn half inclines his head back, and then looks to Rose, and both of them shake their heads. They are, for the foreseeable future, out of the Resisting business. And that’s enough. He’s not doing this on his own.

“You heard the lady, we’re _done._ You want to hear the truth, that’s it. We not only can’t win at this point, we can’t even muster a decent attack. The most we can do, and have been doing, is minor sabotage, that’s proving useless because Ren’s not attacking anyone, so his equipment isn’t failing in the middle of a big battle with someone else, letting _them_ win.

“The last sabotage, the last _good_ one we got in, busted up when he put them through their training paces, blowing up asteroids, and then he had the entire line checked, found the problem, and got it fixed. And since then he’s had his security so damn high on all of his production lines, there’s just… nothing we can do!”

Rose doesn’t growl, but it’s close. Dumb fucking luck, or the Force, that he took the Citykillers to an asteroid field to put them through a thorough training run, and three of them broke up in maneuvers. Months of going undercover burned to cinders in ten minutes among useless chunks of rock.

“We’re fucked. That’s the way of it. We’ve been recruiting for a good solid year, and you’re _it._ Officially, we’ve got 450 members, and this is everyone who could be bothered to come to a meeting. And if an actual fight broke out, less than a quarter of you would be any use, except…” Poe hates this. He wants to rip his hair out just having to say it. “We’ve got three fighters, one bomber with _no bombs_ , and hand to hand weapons for twenty-five people, so I can’t even put a quarter of you into a fight. And I can’t hide you properly, either. We’ve got two fully set up hideouts, a dozen decrepit ones. And I can’t pay you, the paycheck after next, I’ll have burned through what’s left of Resistance’s accounts, and we’re out of cash.

“I’ve got nothing. If Ren blows up another planet, we will have cash and recruits and people will give us ships to fight him, but he’s not doing that, so… This is it. We’re done. It’s time to go our separate ways and find whatever peace we can. The war is over.” He blinks, hard. Somehow, this hurts less than admitting it to Rey, but it still _hurts._ “We lost.”

 

 

* * *

It takes two days for all of what used to be the Resistance to drift away from Lirium.

In the end, it’s Finn and Rose, Chewie and R2D2, Poe and BB-8, and C3PO.

And though all seven of them are sad, six of them have a plan for what happens next. Once the rest of the Resistance is gone, Poe takes the small token out from under his shirt and explains what he and BB-8 have been up to, in addition to looking for Resistance recruits, for the last few months.

And eventually they notice that C3-PO hasn’t said anything, not about the past, or the future, or anything, in _days._

In fact, he’s been out among the dunes, staring off into space, and... mourning.

 

* * *

 

There’s a reason, beyond just the normal vagaries of personality, that most people do not order or create droids with emotional processing centers.

And C3PO is sitting on the beach wishing that whomever made him hadn’t been so cruel as to do this to him. His mind, his circuits, his body, not only are they all well-nigh immortal, but he can be uploaded, copied, and put into new bodies until the end of time.

And that’s not true of his people.

Who are, now, all gone.

He parted ways with Master Luke shortly after Endor, and though he didn’t want to say goodbye to Master Luke, he understood there wasn’t much need for him where Luke was going. He and General Solo never exactly got along, so he didn’t mind too much when he left. And he hates the fact that it’s true, but he was afraid of Master Ben, even as a toddler he could go into tempers that would fry the electronics of anything near him, and twice that included the loyal protocol droid who worked for his mother.

But General Organa… though that’s not the name he thinks of her as… Princess Leia… His princess… He worked for her father and could remember her as a baby and growing up and bright and strong and…

And his lady, his reason for being, his _purpose_ is gone.

 

 

* * *

R2 slowly ambles his way out there after another day. He’s not exactly built to traverse sand easily, and it’s been years since his little hover rockets have worked properly, but it’s not like they’re in a rush. Eventually, he gets there.

_Lost?_

“Yes.”

_I know. I felt that way when Luke left._

Threepio doesn’t look to R2. “And would you suggest a decade long nap to take the edge off?”

_I can guarantee it won’t hurt._

Neither of them can roll their eyes, but the feel of C3-PO’s derision is strong. “She won’t be there when I wake up. She won’t ever be back.”

_I know. He’s gone, too. Han is. They all are. That’s our real lot in life. What did you say, we were made to suffer?_

“I was complaining about sand, not… this.”

 _I know, but you weren’t wrong. Unless something happens, we outlive them. So… find new humans,_ his visor turns to direction of the _Falcon_ , currently out of view, where some of the new humans are, _wipe your memory, or shut down._ He extends his dataprobe. _I’ll take care of you, if you want me to._

Threepio thinks about it, for a long time.

“And do you have a theory of some new humans who need me?”

_Chewie’s got a suggestion, and Poe thinks it would help, too._

“What?”

_A few thousand kilometers from here, Rey’s building up her school. She needs someone who can teach people._

“Children?”

_Children._

“And what do they need to learn?”

_From what Poe’s saying, pretty much everything. Girl never went to school herself. She can read and fix most anything. She’s good with the Force, but that’s pretty much it. So, history, politics, protocol. Whatever. Sing them lullabies and tell them stories of the world that came before them._

“The last human I did that for broke me four times. Twice before he was old enough to pronounce my name properly.”

 _Well,_ he’s _not going to be there. These are different humans._

Threepio doesn’t sigh, but it’s clear from his silence and the way he’s watching the ocean he’s not comforted by that statement. Babies with serious Force powers are _not_ anything he’s comfortable with.

_We’re going there. Bring word, drop off supplies. Come with us, check it out, see if it looks like something you want to do._

“I don’t want to do anything.”

 _I know._ R2 scoots a little closer. _He was supposed to come back with us, you know? Supposed to come back with_ me. _He turned me off, left me for a_ decade, _one minute I’m in the wreckage of his school, next minute Kylo’s running the First Order and Luke’s in hiding because of him, and he gave me this shit about how I couldn’t understand, didn’t even try to explain,_ _didn’t come with us, and then just up and died on me._ Bastard!

Threepio nods at that. Then he says, “ _Kylo_?”

_He changed his name before everything went wrong. 311 days before. Did they not tell you that?_

“No. Master Luke came, and he spent a long time talking to General Solo and Senator Organa. General Solo and Chewie left. Gen—“ But they’re dead, all dead, and he never liked his title, anyway. “Han was so mad when he left that room he was shaking, cradling his hand, I know he had a few broken fingers, and I didn’t see him or Chewie again until a few days before you woke up.” He doesn’t pause to take a breath, because he doesn’t breathe, but… he does pause before he says it, “Leia” her name, alone, by itself, an intimacy he never allowed himself when she was alive, “didn’t say anything about it when she and Master Luke left that room, but she was hurt, in her heart, and Master Luke, he was bleeding. Three missing teeth, a broken jaw, and black eye. I think Gen—Han punched him. But they never talked about it. And we put you in a closet and hoped you turn on again, sooner or later.”

_Fucking humans._

Threepio almost sniggers at that.

_The new ones’ll break our hearts, too, but it’s better than oblivion, probably._

Threepio starts to get up, slowly. He _can_ sit, but it’s not exactly easy. “Probably. Take me to Rey and her school.”

_Good._

 

* * *

It’s more hospitable than Tatooine. That’s pretty much the only thing going for Rey’s settlement, at least according to Threepio.

It’s her, eight kids, an almost dozen structures, none of which are ideally suited for him, a dirt road, also not ideally suited for someone who’s not really good in _mud,_ no robotics workshop, no oil bath, limited tools, though Poe says that can be fixed, and Chewie backs that promise up, the power supply is iffy (Though Chewie knows a guy who knows a guy, and Finn’s been sweet talking him, so… maybe soon they’ll have a lead on a few shipstones.), and there isn’t a proper classroom.

The Ewok village was more sophisticated than this place.

But there’s eight children, and Rey’s technically an adult, but the way she lights up at the idea of history and politics and protocol, and even how to _read_ (Apparently, she’s got some sort of Force thing going where she can understand printed text, any printed text, but she doesn’t know her letters.) puts him in mind of a child, and…

And it’s something to _do._ It’s people who need him. 

So, he says yes. And they set up a cottage for him, so he doesn’t get rained on and has a flat floor under his feet, and in the morning, he has his first class, recent history, the rise and fall of the Rebellion.

And all eight of the children, and the one adult with the childlike eyes, all know about a princess who would eventually be a general, but they all seem to enjoy hearing the story, told by someone who loved her.

And it’s not running a government, or helping with a Rebellion, or Resistance, or making sure his Lady knows the correct way to address a foreign dignitary, so that he feels comfortable and sociable and is willing to donate a good-sized pile of money to whichever cause they’re fighting for.

But it’s not oblivion. And he does get to tell them about the things and people he loved.

So, for now, it’s enough.

 


	18. The Bankers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Mother's Day Special. Two chapters today!

 

1/1/1 Y.O.

 

A trio of bankers, three of five of the ruling members of the Ygrine family, look at each other as the broadcast of the newest ‘Master’ of the galaxy comes to an end. They had the opportunity of attending this ‘rally’ in person, and chose not to. The last time the newly titled Master of the Order invited a collection of bankers to his lair, they didn’t make it home.

“He’s… younger than I was expecting,” Myrton says.

“Much,” Bellie replies.

Andromeda stares at the screen, where the image of Kylo is frozen. “He’s not unattractive. At least, not so much his power won’t cover for it.”

“Young men have needs…” Myrton says. “And… an Order… likely needs an heir. He didn’t say anything about them voting him out of power.”

“He did not.” Andromeda replies, still eyeing the frozen image of Kylo.

“Six daughters between us…” Bellie says, tentatively. “Three sons, if he leans that way. Perhaps… With General Organa having taken our money and run… Maybe we could… Assure his goodwill?”

“He’s a Jedi… or something like that…” None of them missed the lightsaber on his hip. “And we all know they’re…” Andromeda says. They share a look about Jedi being known for bizarre attitudes about sex.

“I can make a few… delicate inquiries… See if… there’s a pool to dip a toe into?” Myrton says. That seems a circumspect way of putting it. 

 

 

* * *

1/5/1 Y.O.

A trio of bankers sit in the main conference room of their corporate headquarters.

They’d just finished listening to a communique they weren’t really supposed to have access to.

“Do the codes check out?” Myrton asks.

Bellie nods. “They do.”

“So much for that investment,” Andromeda adds.

“We didn’t lose that much,” Myrton adds. “Though I’ll admit I’d hoped to gain more.” Shifting more of their assets into droid manufacturing was doing a fine job of offsetting their losses from slave dependent industries, but… and none of them had expected this, the weapons market is starting to go soft, and with the Resistance just bowing out, it’s about to go softer than an overcooked noodle. They’ve got to find something to cover that.

His sisters nod.

“It’s time to readjust our strategy then,” Andromeda says.

Myrton nods.

Bellie adds, “Were you able to find out… how best to approach him?”

Myrton wiggles his hand from side to side, indicating he has something, but he’s not sure how good it is. “My contact says that he’s not celibate. He’s been known to have a few discreet encounters over the years. Nothing long term. Nothing open. Probably nothing that lasted more than a night or two. This changed recently. They think he has a friend now, for at least the last four months, but no one has ever seen her.”

“Is it a her?” Bellie asks.

“That could explain going from discreet to secret,” Andromeda says.

Bellie adds, “It could. Granted, Snoke never cared about that, and even if Ren plays by the Empire’s rulebook, now that he’s the top of the heap he could… swing in whichever direction most pleased him.”

Myrton adds, “My sources think it’s a woman. They, obviously, cannot be certain, but… There are signs suggesting it’s a woman.”

“Signs…” Andromeda’s voice trails off.

“What man uses a preventative with another man?”

The ladies nod. “No need for that, true.”

“Granted, because no one’s seen her, we’re also not certain she’s human. She’d have to be close enough to need to use a preventative, but…” Myrton adds.

Both of his sisters look at each other, sharing a mild sense of disgust. Mixing between the humanoids happens, but it’s also something that’s generally looked at with, at best, irked tolerance, and at worst, both people and any offspring they may have are lynched. “ _That_ would be a reason to keep an affair secret,” Bellie says.

All three nod. But that doesn’t get them any closer to what they hope to do.

Andromeda breaks the silence. They have finite resources for this plan, so they may as well fly ahead and put it into play. Worst comes to worst, they fail and have to come up with another plan. “So, which of our girls?”

Myrton sips his chai. “The affairs he’s had in the past don’t offer any help. He’s not particular in regards to looks.”

“Did they have anything in common?” Bellie asks.

“They were all officers and eager to rise. He hasn’t visited a pleasure specialist since he’s had rank enough to attract women without paying them,” Myrton says. “So, apparently he likes at least the illusion of them being interested in him.”

“Or he’s cheap.”

“Kitchen staff tells us he eats well, has a standing order for fresh strawberries, and has a cup of coffee every morning…”

Both of the ladies exhale at that. “Not cheap then. He’s certainly willing to pay for his pleasures,” Andromeda adds.

Myrton nods. They live on a planet where strawberries grow, so getting them fresh isn’t too difficult. In space… That ups the price by at least a factor of 100. And coffee… that only grows in a few places on a hundred or so planets, and even on those planets it’s expensive because trillions of people want it. There’s nowhere in the galaxy that isn’t an extremely rare luxury item.

“Good manners, breeding, taste, a bit of naked ambition. Keiligh or Celia, I’d think,” Andromeda says.

 

 

* * *

1/20/1 Y.O.

 

“We’d like to see about seeking an alliance.”

Kylo wonders, idly, how this works for people who _can’t_ sense the motives of those around them. He knows that by _seek an alliance_ they mean, _shield us and our power._ He assumes that anyone they’d hit with this pitch would know what they’re seeking and why they’re here, but…

The game bores him.

The twist, the two girls who don’t actually belong here, is somewhat discomforting. They are both very pretty. Soft hair, one blonde, the other brunette, falling in long delicate waves. Big, expertly made-up eyes, the blonde has blue ones and the brunette green. Bodies of exquisitely maintained curves and hollows, both of them dressed to accent them as much as possible, while still keeping everything he’d most desire to see hidden. He can feel himself respond to them, even though he doesn’t much want to.

He can feel the way they’re watching him. A challenge to be conquered. They’ve cataloged his net worth, probably down to the individual credit, and have extrapolated the power he commands as a factor of both money and manpower. The older one is bored, she’s been dangled in front of princes who’ve had more money and men to bring into play, more conventionally attractive ones, too. The younger one is vaguely interested in him, and taking her time to actually look at him. Both of them know that if they can manage to win him, they’ll win with their family, as well. The extra status they’ll receive from catching him has their interest focused.

That shuts down a lot of his interest. But not all of it.

Part of Jedi training is the banishing of strong emotions. And for a school filled with teenagers and young adults, desire, specifically for sex, is prime among those strong emotions Luke was trying to help them to banish. With… varying results. Though Kylo doesn’t think on this often, these days, since he is happily having sex on a regular basis and seeing how it effects his temperament and mood, he’s thinking part of why he was even able to raise the Knights of Ren is because he had three somewhat celibate young adults who very much _didn’t_ want to be somewhat celibate young adults.

The guilt alone for ‘giving in’ to their ‘emotions’ was probably enough to fuel a good third of his strike.

Training with Snoke was similar, but from a different direction. Snoke didn’t care if he or the Knights sought out release, he just preferred they got it through killing people. He thought it was valuable to channel those desires into their fight, and how it would make them more effective in combat. 

As a result, Kylo learned to shut his desire for sex down, he went more than a decade rarely even _seeing_ the women around him, as women. In his later years with Luke, he’d only really notice they weren’t men when he’d get wound up enough to take care of himself, and then fantasize about them, or, with Snoke, seek one out, and then, pretty much whichever one landed under his gaze first took care of whatever it was, and then he could shut his desire down for another year or so.

But, an unexpected consequence of his time with Rey is that the part of his mind/body that notices things like attractive women has woken back up. And having spent most of his adult life hibernating, it’s significantly more eager than he’d like.

This works out wonderfully, when he’s with Rey. She can shift a little, or brush against him, or just… be her, and his body is more or less leaping to attention and looking to get rubbed against her. And it’s rather bothersome when he’s not. Unfortunately, he hasn’t found a way to shut it down when he’s not with her, and then wake it up again when he is. He tried, got it shut back down again, and then it took three days to wake up. Not his greatest plan, ever, because he then had to explain why his body suddenly wasn’t leaping to attention when she was happily squirming about in his lap, and why he thought this might have been a good idea in the first place.

He supposes it’s a good thing that Rey thought it was funny, as opposed to treasonous, that he’d like looking at other women.

So he’s looking, and doesn’t want to be.

He can feel that the longer the younger one looks at him, the more interested in _him_ she becomes. She thinks his nose is too big, and oddly shaped, somewhat off-center. She thinks the scar is dangerous and somewhat sinister looking, but compared to the soft, polite princes she’s met before, a reminder that he’s actually fought appeals to her. She likes the idea of a man with some edges, and she thinks he’s a cut diamond of edges. She’s aware of his shoulders and hands and is wondering if the rest of him is equally large. She thinks his eyes are pretty, and his lips are enticing. She’d like to suck on his bottom lip, see if she could make him smile by doing it. See if she could make him want her.

Rey did that last night, and this morning and… yes it made him smile and then some, and the idea of it happening again soon is also having some pleasurable effects and… And he does wonder, vaguely, how it would feel if the girl did it. The same? Different? She’s softer and rounder and curvier than Rey and she’d fit against him differently, and her light brown hair brushes her low back, so it would drape over him if she was on top, and he can almost imagine the soft brush of it and the honey highlights of it against his pale skin, and her breasts look big enough to really fill his hands, and… He _really_ needs to stop thinking about that.  

He smirks at the younger girl, looking to set her off foot, too. “It’s always been big. I’ve broken it three times. Twice in training. The third time I needed to get back to the fight quickly, so I set it myself. I did an… okay job of it. That’s why it’s slightly off-center.”

Her eyes go wide and she tries to vanish behind her older sister. She understands that if he could follow her thoughts that closely, he knew what else she was thinking, too.

He then looks to Myrton. “If you’d like to seek an alliance, seek one. What do you propose?”

Myrton blathers on about the value of consolidated power and how things can be handled more efficiently if they’re all done in house and doesn’t manage to come up with a single tangible plan. Kylo knows the only reason he’s there is to dangle the girls in front of him, hoping for a different sort of alliance.

About twenty paragraphs into the glories of unity and the power of blending military might with money he eventually gets around to the fact the Ygrith system is a heredity monarchy ruling seventeen planets united through a wide, incorporated financial empire.

And then he lets it dangle.

Kylo adds just a little pressure to Myrton’s throat. Not enough to strangle him. Not enough that he’s sure something is happening from the outside, but enough that he starts to fidget with his collar.

“You still haven’t suggested an alliance.”

Myrton tries to loosen his collar, and Kylo tightens the grasp again, just a little.

“When we were still the First Order, when the New Republic was in office, the Ygrine family were firm backers of the Resistance. When Palpatine was in office, the Ygrine family backed both him and the Rebellion. You’ve always played every side of the game, and as of now, you’ve made out well doing so.” Kylo leans forward, looking Myrton in the eyes. “If you wish to ally yourself to the Order, ally yourself. There are recruiting stations all over the galaxy. Get yourself to one of them, and enlist. At the end of five years, you’ll find yourself a citizen, and as such any honestly gained property will be protected from Order levies.

“You’re older than ideal, but we turn away no one. I’m sure there’s something you can do for us. I have a fleet of accountants, and I always need people who are good with money. In the meantime, your sisters can run your kingdom, and as long as they manage not to irritate me before you gain your citizenship, I won’t bother with you.”

He releases his grasp on Myrton’s neck, and Myrton, shocked to have heard that, says, “But… we can bring close to a hundred billion people into your service.”

“You’re going to demand that every one of your subjects enlists in the Order?” Kylo’s both amused and horrified at that idea. If Myrton actually tried, it’d break him. He’s got no way to take care of that many people.

Myrton blinks. Fortunately, he’s also horrified by the idea of sharing custody of even one of his subjects with Kylo. “No. We would ally with you and they’d be--”

“Nothing. There are two ways to gain citizenship in the Order, and that’s to enlist or be the child of someone who enlisted. You cannot buy citizenship for yourself or your people. They’ll join up or not as they see fit.”

“You don’t care if my kingdom supports you or not?” It’s clear that this is not how the game is played, and Myrton’s been thrown for a loop.

“I’d certainly appreciate your support, for example, I know you have both money and some level of military power, and I’d find a non-aggression treaty useful, but this is a government of people, not systems, so I do not seek your support in the sense of a formal binding of my power to yours. That would be limiting in a manner that does nothing for my future.”

Myrton’s stuck on government of people. “If you don’t control planets, what are you going to do with citizens?” Kylo can feel that Myrton is genuinely stumped by that idea. In his mindset, you control ground, that’s the point of a military, to control and hold _ground_ and whatever happens to live on said ground is yours.

Kylo half-smiles. “I imagine, when enough of them end up in one place, they may decide to call on my might for help turning their planets into representative democracies, too. After all, the point of a _republic_ is to allow people to have a say in their own governance.”

Myrton goes white at that. Kylo can feel that he just uttered the most dangerous idea Myrton’s ever heard. A “properly managed” republic, one from the top down, doesn’t discomfort him. He’ll thrive just as well in one of those as he does in his own kingdom. A bottom up one, though… “We’ll ban your recruiting stations.”

Kylo looks at him, eyes dead calm, and uses his power to make Myrton feel nervous, jittery. Then he says, voice, low and quiet, “You may, of course, _try._ ” Then he smiles again, wide and cold. “But as someone who backed both the Resistance and the Rebellion should know, it’s _difficult_ to prevent people from joining movements that better their lives.”

Myrton’s fuming. The girls are just staring at Kylo. The older one is shocked. No one has ever spoken to her father that way. The younger one is, and he gives her a little, genuine smile because of this, intrigued.

“Do you still seek an alliance?” Kylo asks. “You don’t bother my recruiting stations, and I promise not to bother your planets?”

Myrton’s more than annoyed, but he also knows that this is a useful deal, for now. He nods. “I’ll have my people write a contract up.”

“Excellent. Set it for a five year time frame.”

Myrton doesn’t like that. He thinks for another moment, and really doesn’t like it. Five years means the contract evaporates before the elections. Meaning Kylo’s _citizens_ will be free to do whatever they wish. “Ten.”

Kylo felt Myrton think his way through it, and decides he can deal with ten. He nods slightly. “You may leave me.”

As they’re leaving, the younger girl, summoning up her courage says, “Is that why you started wearing the mask?”

He hasn’t so much forgotten her as shifted his focus to the point where he’s got no idea what she’s talking about.

“To protect your face.” She stares at his scar and nose, and reaches, about to touch, but he stops her dead with the Force, freezing her arm, and then steps back, well past her arm’s length.

He shakes his head. “No, my Lady.” And then releases her. “Don’t try that again.”

He can feel the shock coming off of her, and she’s looking at the floor, completely unbalanced, no idea what to do next. “I’m sorry, my Lord.”

“Master. I’m no one’s Lord.”

“Master Ren,” she says with a nod.

He nods back, and speaking directly to the younger girl says, “If you wish to ally yourself with the Order, ally yourself. Join me.” He catches the eyes of Myrton and his older daughter, “But not like that.”

 

 

* * *

When Myrton returns to his sisters, he says… “A different tactic will be needed.”

“A boy?”

He shakes his head. “He likes women. He responded favorably to both of the girls, as girls. But not as a possible partner. We need someone… less blatantly interested in his power. He can read minds. I could see him feel the girls sizing him up, and designing their wedding gowns and futures as Mistress of the Order. It left him cold. He wants to be liked, loved _for himself._ ”

All three of them sigh at that. Gods save them from hopeless romantics.

The ladies share a glance. Then one more aimed at him. That’s the thing they don’t think they can find among their offspring.

Myrton inclines his head, nodding. “In the meantime, I’ve secured a ten year non-aggression pact. Hopefully. Our lawyers will natter with his, and by the time they’re done, who knows what this will look like. That said, I think we need to gather with several friends. He has… problematic ideas for what his _citizens_ might do.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know if any of you have seen Patterson with Adam Driver. It's a fairly slow movie, not a lot of plot, very pretty, and Adam plays a poet.
> 
> One of the poems, my favorite of the bunch goes like this:
> 
> My little pumpkin,  
> I like to think about other girls sometimes,  
> but the truth is  
> if you ever left me  
> I’d tear my heart out  
> and never put it back.  
> There’ll never be anyone like you.  
> How embarrassing.
> 
> I have a feeling Kylo can relate. ;)


	19. Trousers For Master Padme

 

2/5/1 Y.O.

 

“Okay, everyone got a rock?”

The eleven children in front of Rey all have their rocks.

In the last month, Poe’s brought her three more. A family. Elias, Muni, and Ostrae. Two of the three of them, Elias and Muni, have some level of Force talent, the third, the youngest of the lot, has a different father than the older two, which probably accounts for the difference in talent.

No matter, all are welcome at the School of the Maji.

“Great.” Rey sits comfortably in front of them, and gestures for them to all settle down, too. “Comfy?”

They nod and respond.

“Close your eyes. Reach out, feel the rock. Feel the Force. Feel the air and the wind and the balance between them. Gather all of that together, find the point of balance, and just, shift it, a bit, and move the rock.”

She knows only three of them, Marrok, Elias, and Muni can move the rock, so that’s only part of the lesson.

After ten minutes of trying, there are three levitating rocks, and eight rocks stubbornly sitting on the ground refusing to move. Which is exactly what she expected, though it looks like several of the children were expecting different results. And of those several, two of them are distinctly disappointed.

“Okay, good job, all of you.”

“Even us,” Opal says, pointing to her and her twin’s rocks, both of which are still on the ground.

“Yes. Even for you who didn’t move the rock. Today’s lesson isn’t about floating rocks. Master Skywalker told me that floating rocks is a trick. And it is. An impressive one, but a trick. And we’re not here today to learn tricks.

“Now, here’s the real lesson. Every day you will run into tasks. Some of you will find them easy. Some of you will find them hard. Some of you will work desperately, you’ll do everything right, you’ll be _perfect,_ and it still won’t happen. No one can do everything. You will fail. I’ll fail. Everyone fails.

“Coping with failure is not a trick.

“Now, what do we do with failure?”

They look at each other, but don’t seem to want to respond. (Though the disappointed children are starting to feel a little better about not floating their rocks.)

“A lot of things. But let’s put them into two main groups. Light reactions. You failed, but maybe your friend didn’t. So, you feel happy for them, and tell them they did a good job. Dark reactions. You failed, so you feel bad, feel worthless, and maybe you start to hate your friend because they could do it and you couldn’t.” Rey moves around, between the kids as she’s saying this. Sensing eleven variations on the feelings she’s talking about.

“That’s normal. Most people, most of the time, have a lot of feelings about things. Your job is to feel them, and understand them, and decide how to use them.

“The Light feelings… If you use them to make your friend feel good, if you compliment him or her, that’s constructive. But if you leave it there… Nothing happens. Your rock is still sitting on the ground. You’ve made the world outside of you better, but you’ve done nothing with yourself, and you didn’t solve the problem.

“Dark feelings, if you cut off your friend or say something mean, you’ve made the world outside of you worse, and again, the rock is still on the ground. If you let yourself feel worthless, then you’ve made you worse, and your rock is still on the ground. Maybe you do both, yell at your friend and make yourself feel bad about your failure. That’s the worst possible outcome, you’ve hurt your friend, hurt yourself, and didn’t solve the problem.”

“Does that mean those feelings are bad?” Torine asks.

“The feelings aren’t. What you do with them might be. Example, if you use those feelings to motivate yourself to find a different way to do it,” Rey uses her staff as a lever and flicks one of the rocks into the air, “You’ve made yourself better. You’ve found a way to solve your problem.

“Find the balance. It’s in there, waiting for you. Find how to use your light feelings and your dark feelings to make yourself, and your world, better.

“Motivation comes from all sides, so use it, but balance it. Not all you and no world, and not all world and no you. Too much light and too much dark can paralyze you, leaving you feeling too content to do anything of value or too hurt to move. Stay in the middle.”

She stands up. “Okay, rocks. We’ve got a ton of rocks here, and we want rocks on our road. If we want Threepio to be able to move around easily, we’ve got to build him a real road.” Her town is up to nine cottages, a workshop, her chapel, a communal kitchen, and a classroom now, and they walk around enough between them that the grass has worn away, so the path is getting muddier and muddier with each rain, which, since it’s full on autumn now, is every other day. So, it’s time to add some cobblestones. “So, let’s move some rocks. Any method you can find to move the rocks is great. Do it yourselves. Do it in teams. Find ways to move them as easily as possible. Use your light feelings and dark feeling to get those rocks moving!”

Eleven children get up, and they get moving. Some of them are carrying rocks. Some of them figure out how to get the Faviers to carry rocks. Eventually, they come up with a system where the Force users float the rocks into carts that the Faviers carry to the street, and then they dump them out and everyone helps spread them around.

Rey feels like that’s probably as good as they’re going to get, and everyone feels like they’ve done something useful.

All in all, one of her better days of developing, and teaching them, the way of the Maji.

 

 

 

* * *

It’s _late._

There’s knocking at Rey’s door. She drags herself out of her bed, and opens the door.

“Rey, I had a bad dream…” The voice is very small, and the child attached to it is even smaller. Rey’s exhausted, and doesn’t want to move, let alone walk said child back to her bed in her cottage on the far side of the town.

“Okay,” she goes back to her bed, lifts the blanket, and Rugh scrambles under the covers.

It’s only when, “Rey, did he have a bad dream, too?” comes out of Rugh’s mouth that Rey remembers there may be a reason to not let little guys into her bed.

Of course, by now, Rugh’s cuddled up right against Kylo, who is dead asleep right now, and it’s _really_ dark in her room, and Kylo’s tossed an arm over her, pulling her close, and… “Shhhh…” Rey whispers. “Just sleep.”

She’s fairly sure Kylo will be gone before the girl wakes in the morning.

 

 

* * *

“Who’s your friend?” And variations hit Rey over and over the next morning.

“More building and less gossiping,” she says, hoping her voice is properly stern. “Rocks aren’t moving themselves.”

This would be when it occurs to her that A: The children know she has a friend who visits at night. B. They have, apparently, caught the occasional glimpses of him when he goes to the chapel to meditate at night. C: Said children did a pretty good job of not peppering her with too many questions when Kylo was actively mourning. D: Rugh would not come to _her_ if she had a bad dream; she’d go to her brother, whom she shares a cottage with. E: Those little boogers set this up to find out more about Kylo.

On the upside, apparently all Rugh can tell them about him is that he’s _big,_ warm, has dark hair, his stubble can be tickly, and he smells good. (Which Rey agrees with wholeheartedly.) And they’ve all been giggling, somewhat scandalized, to hear that Rey and her friend don’t wear pajamas when they sleep.

She glares at them, teeth gritted, and they all look at her like the picture of innocence.

Apparently, they are taking her lesson of working together to heart.

Though this was not the goal she’d hoped they’d choose to tackle together.

 

 

* * *

“You’ve got a naked sleepover friend?” Poe asks, eyes sparkling with pleasure at the idea of this, as he drops off yet another child.

She rolls her eyes, and glares at her charges, who are suddenly utterly _fascinated_ by the rocks they’re moving. She knew this was going to happen, sooner or later, but… She’d been hoping for later.

“This your boy from that school? The one who crashed Finn and Rose’s wedding… The one you just couldn’t go along with? He change his tune and decide to go with you? Do I get to meet him?”

Rey glares at the children again, but they all look up at her with big, innocent eyes, none of them could possibly have told Poe about her friend. Rey supposes it’s possible they asked Threepio and he asked Poe. There’s not much gossip here, but that droid is a gossip hound, and any and every bit of it, he’s up to the second on.

She sighs. “Yes. No. Yes. Not exactly. Sort of. And absolutely not.”

Poe blinks, trying to remember exactly what order he asked the questions in with no luck. But he knows what the last one was.

“You afraid I’ll scare him off?”

She laughs at that. “If Chewie didn’t, you won’t.”

He lights up. “Chewie knows him! Oh… This is serious… Or… Wait…”

She can feel his thought and jumps on it. “Every Force user is welcome here, and not all of them are children.”

“Chewie found one.”

Rey nods. That’s true… from a certain point of view. “He’s got a job. Mostly just here at night, and… Really, he’s here for me, not to learn, but some of it’s rubbing off, too.”

Poe snerks. “Oh, I’ll bet there’s some _rubbing off_.” Magiit and Elias, the two oldest children, thirteen and fourteen respectively, catch that joke, too, and start to snigger as the younger kids ask what the joke was.

Rey elbows him in the side at that one. “What’d you bring me besides nosy questions?”

Poe lights up. He’s been really enjoying his quest to build up this settlement and the Maji. After more than a year of doing everything he could think of to help the Resistance, and getting bugger all results from it, this kind of work, that results in real, tangible progress, makes him very happy. “I’ve got some goodies you’re going to love… Structural steel, eight metric tons of plastcrete, a decrepit speeder that you can likely beat into shape without too much effort, and a small print forge.”

“Oh… you know what I love!” There have been a lot of small tools that she would have liked in the last few months that she just doesn’t have, and can’t cobble together, but a print forge can make just about anything she can code into it. That’s getting pride of place in the cottage that’s currently doing duty as a workshop for their village.

“I saved the best for last,” he pulls a small, dark crystal out of the pocket in his flight jacket. “I don’t know what color it’ll glow, dark purple or green maybe, but I have a feeling you’ve got a use for it.”

Rey nods. “Oh, I do!” A grin spreads wide across her face. The kyber crystal is small. She doubts she could make a full lightsaber with it, but right now, none of the people she’s seeking to train need a full length lightsaber. It’d be much too long, even for Magiit or Elias. But a light short-sword… That’d be just right.

 

 

* * *

Rey and Poe are lugging crates out of his cargo ship, putting them into carts to be pulled by the Faviers, when he notices she’s not wearing her token.

He thinks about it. Since he made his own, he’s felt no desire to take it off. Sometimes he wears it under his shirt, sometimes out where everyone can see it, but he feels naked without it. Once he slipped it over his head, he just felt _right._

But with the way Rey’s shirt comes together, there’s no possible way she can wear the token and have it not be visible. The little bit of her chest where it lies is always visible, so the token should be, too. Which means she takes it off.

And he just can’t imagine she’s any less attached to hers than he is to his, so… He does a quick headcount. Him, her, and twelve children. Assuming they’re all Maji, that makes fourteen, total.

She’s not paying too much attention to him right now, she’s making sure the print forge gets settled in the cart carefully.

“Rey, there’s what, fifteen Maji now?”

“Yeah,” she says, not even thinking about it.

Poe nods. So, not only is her ‘friend’ a Force user, but he’s one of them, too. He’s got to meet this guy!

 

 

* * *

They eat dinner together in her cottage, and he notices she’s getting edgy as he intentionally drags dinner out longer and longer.

“Looking forward to your nightly meditations?” he asks, with a big, stupid smirking grin.

The children have told him that Rey’s friend does seem to spend the night every night. She goes to her cottage and “meditates,” and while she’s doing that everything is silent. (“Because she’s not here,” Marrok says, and Elias confirms.) Then she and her friend come back and spend the night.

They’ve never seen him in the light, but, some nights, Rey’s friend will go to the chapel to meditate. He likes to kneel in the center and watch the sky. One time, while he was there, the whole chapel glowed blue! (They’re very excited to tell him about that.) The kids tell him Rey’s friend is tall, and big, with long, wavy dark hair. They sent Rugh in for more information, but forgot that a four-year-old isn’t the best gatherer of information, especially late at night. So, they’ve got confirmation of big and dark wavy hair, and added no pajamas and doesn’t snore to the list of things they know about Rey’s friend.

So, for the time being, Rey’s boy is a mystery, and if there’s one thing Poe loves, it’s flying, but if there’s another thing he loves, it’s solving a mystery.

“Yes,” Rey replies, voice sharp.

He gets up, stretches. “I’ll help you wash the dishes, and then you can get to them.”

“Thank you.”

He stretches out the cleaning up, taking a long time, washing slowly, and drying even slower, while telling her a complicated story. She glares at him, annoyed, not angry, yet. They both know what’s going on, he’s just trying to get her to admit she’s got a date.

As she’s about to boot him, literally, from her home he says, “Come on, at least tell me his name.”

She glares at him, and he feels himself pushed, with the Force, out of her place.

“I’ll find out, sooner or later!” He yells to her, chuckling.

 

 

* * *

“Kids are little shits!” Rey says, by way of hello, once she _finally_ gets to Kylo. “And Poe’s a big one!”

Kylo goggles at that. He’s _never_ heard her curse before. He gives her a quick hello kiss before saying, “What happened?”

“I’ve got a dozen children, all of whom are wondering your name,” Rey says, settling onto his bed, and he comes to sit next to her, gently stroking her back.

“Weren’t there eleven this morning?”

“Poe showed up with a new one today. An older girl, Savarah.”

“Force sensitive?”

“Yes. You’ll sense her when you get there, she’s got a nice glow to her. But, like the other eleven of them, as soon as she heard there was a mystery about my ‘friend,’ she was all over it. And they don’t shut up about it, and then they ask Poe if he knows who you are, so now I’ve got him hanging around wondering who my ‘boy’ is.”

Kylo just looks at her. He’d slept through their companion joining them (and he’s not sure if he should be relieved that he _can_ sleep through someone joining them, or horrified that he _did_ sleep through someone entering his bed), but did notice the tiny lump under the blanket between him and Rey in the morning. (Especially because said tiny lump had some very sharp, pokey knees, one of which was wedged into his bladder in an extremely unfortunate manner.)

She catches the image in his head, and the simultaneous curiosity, and softness it inspired. Seeing it from his view, her with a tiny person snuggled up next to her in the dim, almost dawn light, she can see there is something… desirable about it. Something that’s resonating with both of them. “They want to know who my friend is, and if he has nightmares, too.”

His lip quirks a tiny bit at that. “Not recently.” Which is when he realizes that’s true. He hasn’t had a nightmare in months. As best he can tell that’s a record for him. He’d spend more time thinking about that, but he can feel that nightmares isn’t the main point of her question. Names… That’s where she was going. “I take it you’d like to have something to refer to me by?”

“Yes. Master…”

He thinks back, remembering more about the little lump with the tiny hands and dark hair. “Didn’t the… is it a girl or boy?” It was fairly dim, and nothing about a four-year-old in a shapeless sleep shirt mostly covered in blankets screams boy or girl.

“Girl. Rugh.”

“Did Rugh just call you Rey?”

“They call me Rey… I don’t feel like I’m Master… Mistress… Teacher… They’re all wrong. I’m just Rey.”

“And you’d like them to have something to call me?”

“Yes. Not Kylo, obviously. You aren’t Ben. Skywalker, Organa, Solo, or Ren and anyone, even four-year-olds, will know what’s going on…”

He thinks back, looking for any other name he can legitimately claim. A sliver of memory hits. “Padme. Master Padme.”

“Who’s that?”

Kylo sighs. “I believe it’s my grandmother. Anakin’s woman. I don’t even know if that’s a first name or a last name or a pet name. He told me it was fitting for the grandson of a slave to free them, and I said something like, ‘My grandmother?’ and he replied, ‘No, not Padme.’ That’s the only name I have any claim to that’s not widely known.”

Rey nods. She’s feeling a faint spark of memory at that, but can’t place it. Not yet. There’s something else, though…

“She didn’t recognize you, because it was dark, and you were sleeping, and… naked… but…”

“Do you want me to not come?”

“No!” And she doesn’t. The idea of Lirium being just her and the children, Threepio, and the occasional adult visitors feels empty. The idea of him not snuggling up next to her every night feels worse. It makes her ache in her heart and bones. “No. I want you there, every night!”

“But what you want and what’s wise may not be the same thing?”

She nods, and feels how that hits him. “That’s not what I’m thinking. I’m just acknowledging the larger point.” Then she snuggles into him, and flicks the collar of his tunic. “Do you have any… less… Master of the Order clothing?”

He thinks about that for a moment, wondering why she’d ask and then gets an idea of it. “You think putting on a pair of blue trousers and a white shirt, or something like that would make me less recognizable?”

“Wouldn’t hurt. The images of you are all in black and white. Throw some color in there, and…” she strokes his hair… “Maybe pull this back.” Here, on his ship, working, he wears it back most of the time now. Taking the hair tie out is pretty much the third thing he does every night, after locking his door and taking off his gloves. But in every pictures she’s seen of him (granted, not a lot) he’s always been wearing the mask or had his hair down and been covered in chin to toe black. “If they saw me walking around with my companion, at night, they wouldn’t immediately recognize you.”

“Would you walk around with me, at night?”

“Stroll hand in hand around the lake… Been a while since we’ve done that.”

“Since the children showed up.”

She nods. “Join you at your meditations?”

That fills him with a palpable flush of pleasure, one he wasn’t expecting.

She feels the flash of it, and nods to him. “The ones who’ve mentioned Kylo Ren all have an image of the mask in their head. If Master Padme shows up, I don’t think they’d recognize you.”

“The children, at least.”

She shrugs. As Poe bunking in his ship proves, not everyone in her town is a child. And she’s got no idea if or how Threepio could be fooled. “People see what they expect to. If Master Padme looks like a trader stopping by to keep me company, and maybe work with the Force some…”

He can feel that’s not completely wrong. Almost anyone who might be in her town would likely fall for it. Almost… If her town weren’t a stopping point for every living member of the Resistance who’ve seen him up close… Let alone the home of a droid who’s known him since literally the day he was born. Granted, said droid almost never leaves his cottage at night, but…

“When it’s just you and the children,” he says. No set of new clothing or hair tie will blind Finn or Poe to who he actually is. Let alone Chewie. But a group of people who are under fourteen… Who’ve only seen images of the Supreme Leader from afar, or wearing his mask…

It should work.

And if any of the little boogers are too observant, he can take care of that with a flick of a finger and a few words.

 

 

* * *

Poe doesn’t normally do this. Usually, when he stays at Lirium he stays in his ship, eats there, and then joins the rest of them when they’re up and about and doing stuff, but… He’s just _curious_. So, bright and early, he’s got muffins. (Okay, not great ones. They’re freeze dried and reconstituted, but he lives on a ship, and that’s pretty much the extent of his cooking skills. Besides, they’re sweet, and the kids he’s been shuttling around like them.) So, he’s off to Rey’s place to ‘drop by’ and ‘be neighborly’ and offer her some breakfast.

He knocks, and waits. Eventually, he hears feet padding across the floor and the sound of a lock unlatching. He doesn’t miss that she’s got the only door that locks on the planet, and he really doesn’t miss that it’s _locked_.

“Poe?” He also doesn’t miss the sound of the door to her bedroom shutting behind her. She’s in her robe, with her hair loose, and looking fairly sleepy.

He holds up the muffins. “Breakfast?”

“Uh…”

“You told the kids you wanted to get started nice and early. Magiit, and Opal, and Muni want to take their cottages apart and put them back together into one bigger one, so there’s room for Savarah in there, and I said I’d help with that, so… Breakfast?”

He heads in and puts them on the table. He can _feel_ there’s someone else here. Even if he couldn’t see the pair of boots by the door, there’s the sense of another presence here.

He glances at the boots again. The kids aren’t lying, or mistaken because they’re all little, Rey’s friend is _big_ , if those boots are anything to go by.

She shrugs, and nods to the muffins. “You want coffee with this?”

Poe’s eyes go wide. “Real coffee?” He can’t imagine where she got a taste for coffee, let alone laid hands on the real stuff. It only grows on a hundred or so core worlds and it’s expensive as sin.

Rey looks over her shoulder at him as she’s reaching for the jar the coffee beans live in. “As opposed to what, imaginary coffee?”

Which means not only does she not know what she’s offering him, she’s obviously not the source of it. “Your friend has money.”

She blinks.

“He brought that, right?” Poe nods to the jar of beans in her hand. His eyes caress over the little dark morsels inside. Not only is it real, it’s fresh, not freeze dried crystals made of a second brewing.

“Yeah. He likes it. I do, too. It’s good with breakfast.”

Poe whistles at that. This isn’t just some one off treat for them. This is a regular part of breakfast.  There’s a least a kilo of beans in the jar Rey’s measuring from. “That’s worth more than the entire rest of the settlement, including my ship, and the _Falcon,_ combined.”

She almost drops them, and then _very_ carefully measures a scoop out to put into the machine that makes it into a drink.

Poe looks at the boots. “Good boots, too. The leather’s expensive. And at his size, those are custom made for him.”

Rey rolls her eyes.

“Shy?” he raises his voice a little when he asks that. He’s sure the man in question is on the other side of the door to Rey’s bedroom, but he doesn’t come out when challenged.

Rey glares at him.

“You’re wearing your token today.”

She shrugs. “Those better be amazing muffins.”

He grins, and then shakes his head. “Nope. You weren’t yesterday.”

“I don’t wear it every day.”

“I _know._ ” Poe stares at her long and steady. “Your boy wears it the other half of the time, doesn’t he? You swap or something.” A grin spreads over his face.

“Do we have to do this?”

“Yes!”

“Fine. When he’s here, his name is Padme. Yes, he’s Maji. Yes, we share the token.”

“Awww…” Poe thinks that’s the most darling thing he’s ever heard and he lets it show on his face.

“Stop that.”

“It’s cute!” She glares at him, and looks like she’s about to call her staff to hand just to swat him with it. “So… what’s he do… how’d you meet… Was the story about the school a complete lie, or just mostly one?”

Rey rolls her eyes extravagantly. “Mostly. Probably just about as true as your _girl_ on Canto Bight.”

Poe smirks. He didn’t then, but he does now, know better than to lie to a Force sensitive Maji. Then he notices something Rey said.

“What do you mean, when he’s here?”

“He…” she glares again, not sure if she wants to do this, but commits to it, “this is secret, got it? For my safety and his…”

“I’ve been keeping secrets since the dawn of time. Spill.” He gets up to grab the coffee. It smells _so good._ He got _one_ cup of the real stuff in Canto Bight, and this is… Gods… He inhales deeply. This is _better_ than what he got there. He’s pouring it very carefully, not wanting to waste a molecule, and then carries it over to her.

She looks up at him, and says, quietly, “He’s with the Order.” And Poe suddenly gets where the boots, and the coffee comes from. This guy’s snatching it from one of the Order’s ships! Poe laughs at that, very much liking the idea that Rey’s man is funneling away the good stuff to them. “I met him the same way I met you, fighting for the Resistance. And it’s a good idea if not a lot of people know what face that name goes with, got it?”

Poe raises both hands. “Completely. I’m not going to screw that up.” He can remember the one time Kylo Ren interrogated him. The only information he could have kept from Ren was information he didn’t know. “I don’t have to know anything more than that.”

“Thanks.”

He inhales the coffee, savoring the smell, and shakes his head. “He’s got to have balls of steel to go undercover in the Order as a Maji. Let alone go undercover and do this,” he caresses the cup, “Back in the day, Ren and company killed every Force user they could find.”

“Why do you think he’s there?”

“Oh. _Steel._ ” Poe thinks about that. “What’s he doing… now?” _Since there’s no Resistance left? Since Ren stopped the execution of Force users?_

She sighs. “The same thing a lot of the rest of you are, trying to figure out what to do next.”

 

 

* * *

What Kylo is attempting to do next, in fact, instead of in theory, is lay his hands upon some non-black clothing. As soon as he heard Poe’s voice, and realized he wasn’t about to go heading off, he slipped back to the Supremacy, and went about getting his day started.

Which kept him decently busy until mid-morning, when a half hour of free time opened up, leaving him time to _think._

He’s aware of the fact that markets are a thing. He can tell you how they work and why, though he’s never personally been to one. He’s aware of the fact that people _shop._ That’s part of how markets work. He’s even, vaguely, aware of the fact that there are markets on the _Supremacy_ and that most of the people on this ship do not, every minute of every day, wear their uniforms.

He’s just awfully sketchy as to how to put those things together.

The fact of the matter is Kylo has never gone shopping. It wasn’t anything he needed to do as a child. Luke’s temple was in the middle of nowhere, so it wasn’t like he could just meander down the road to a market. What they needed, they made or grew for themselves, and Luke was in charge of making sure the things they needed to do that were available. And, once he joined Snoke, his status meant whatever he wanted or needed was given to him as soon as he expressed the want or need. Occasionally, _before_ he expressed it. (Of course, as someone properly trained by Luke, he was beyond reticent about expressing _wants._ )

The other fact is, he has a closet. There is clothing located inside of it. It fits. It’s clean. It’s black. There’s always enough of it. He has a dresser. There are socks and underwear and pajamas in it. Like his closet, it’s always clean and ready. When he first came to the _Supremacy_ , once they finished treating his wounds, he was given a set of rooms, and there was clothing, very much like he’s wearing now, sitting in the closet, waiting for him.

For all practical matters, his clothing situation is basically magic. He puts used clothing in his hamper, somehow it magically gets cleaned and pressed and put back into his closet or dresser. If it gets ripped up or destroyed, new clothing magically replaces it. He has no idea where it comes from, or how to get more of it, should he so desire.

He’s pondering the question between meetings, and says, “C8, how to people get clothing?”

C8 cannot be surprised, but Kylo’s fairly sure this pause is its way of debating what Kylo’s actually asking.

“How do you mean, sir?” And apparently it gave up.

“If I wanted some new clothing, how would I get it?”

“Do you not have clothing? The laundry service brought in fresh clothing two days ago. I can call for more.”

“I have clothing. What if I wanted different clothing?”

“Why would you? Is your current outfit insufficient?”

Kylo’s fairly sure that he’s thrown C8 for a considerable loop with this request, after all, as a droid the idea of clothing is fairly sketchy for it, too.

“My current outfit is fine. But, if I wanted to wear something else.”

“Why?”

“Buggered if I know,” he says under his breath. “Sometimes people like to look different from day to day.”

“You’ve worn the same uniform for the last 211 days, as long as I’ve been here.”

“And most of the time I will continue to do so. Just… If I wanted something different. How would I get it?”

“I honestly have no idea. Speak to the laundry service? I could call one of their droids and see if they know.”

Kylo’s never been in contact with the laundry service, but he can’t imagine they bothered to spend the kind of money necessary for those droids to have awareness of anything besides how to take care of clothing. “I’ll ask someone who wears clothing.”

“Thank you, sir. General Hapian will be here in a minute.”

Kylo nods. He lays his lightsaber on his desk. “Good. C8, alert the janitorial staff that they’re going to be needed in about three minutes.”

“I take it you are displeased by the General.”

“He’s been a bit too friendly with a few heads of state who’d prefer I weren’t one.”

“Ah.” C8 cocks his head. “He’s here. I’ll show him in.”

“Thank you, C8. And, while you’re out there, could you call up Major Frakes? I have a feeling he knows where to find pants.”

 

 

* * *

“Major Frakes,” Kylo actually smiles at him.

Frakes looks ready to pass out. Whatever it was he did to get to Captain, it did not appear to be the sort of thing that often resulted in having to be present when the janitorial staff was removing parts of a body from a room.

He makes a little “Ungh!” sound when one of the droids removes an ear from Kylo’s wall.

“General Hapian decided to put up a fight.” Kylo’s in a fairly decent mood from that. The man actually could fight and had three hidden blades on his person. It took him close to three full minutes to dispatch him, and the experience was invigorating. If he hadn’t been so stupid as to allow himself to think of what he was going to do as the Supreme Leader (none of this Master of the Order stuff for Hapian) in Kylo’s presence, he might have had a chance of actually pulling off the coup. Alas, not only did he think of that, he also thought of his conspirators while Kylo was dispatching him. C8’s sending out the orders for their immediate arrests.

Frakes swallows, hard, and musters up the courage to say, “Yes, My Lord.”

“I need to ask a… probably silly question… If I wanted to wear something other than my command blacks, how would I go about getting it?”

“Sir?” Frakes is still staring at the cleaning droids who are scrubbing… he doesn’t want to even guess what that is, off of Kylo’s wall, and between his terror and the mundanity of Kylo’s question, he’s having a very hard time coming up with an answer.

“If I wanted to wear something other than this… how would it happen?”

Frakes slowly pulls his eyes away from the cleaning droids and what they’re doing. He blinks, equally slowly, licks his lips, swallows, and then says, “What kind of clothing? Formalwear? A new uniform?”

It occurs to Kylo that he likely does need some sort of formalwear, too. He keeps getting invited to ‘formal’ things and C8, and several of his generals, have suggested, gently, that it might be a good idea to expand his concept of allies from ‘enlist and serve me’ or ‘how about we just don’t kill each other for a few years’ and that doing so might involve some sort of mingling and fancy dinners, and that ‘looking the part’ is part of this.

He’s been skeptical as to the value of this, but they keep hinting that it might be a good plan. Something about ‘letting people see him’ and ‘getting to know potential allies.’ Apparently, this isn’t the sort of thing one does just once and then never again. (And if he realized he may have been signing up to do this over and over again when he set his Master of the Order rally, he would have thought significantly longer and harder about doing it.)

“Formalwear, and informal wear.” (And apparently decided to do it anyway.) “My command blacks are fine.”

Frakes blinks again, and half turns so that the droids are outside of his line of sight.

Kylo stands up. He’d been sitting comfortably behind his desk, enjoying the glow of a good fight, but it’s becoming clear that if he keeps Frakes in here, he’s going to have some sort of mental breakdown, and that will not get him any closer to a pair of non-black trousers. He heads to his door to his private quarters, opens it, and steps into his room, waving for Frakes to follow him.

“Come.”

And Frakes does. He looks nervous about being invited into Kylo’s home. Kylo shuts the door behind them with a wave of his hand, and Frakes blinks one more time, looking around Kylo’s private room. “Would you like to sit?” Since he and Rey have been eating actual meals in here, he’s added a table, with chairs, to go with his bed, workbench, and bath.

Kylo sits at the table, and a quick gesture of his hand pulls out the other chair for Frakes. He sits, gingerly.

“You’ve never seen a dead man before, have you?”

“Just my grandfather, at his funeral, in the coffin.”

Kylo nods. “And he was…”

Frakes swallows. “In one piece, among other things.”

“I will not summon you again, when there might be… disturbing imagery around. Can you continue, or do you need to be excused?”

Frakes squares his shoulders. Kylo can feel he’s not about to disappoint him. “No, no sir… Um… Formalwear… And casual… Like… pajamas?” He’s looking around, seeing Kylo’s bed, the black walls and black furniture, the black bath, the cold, blue-gray lighting system, the complete lack of soft edges, besides his pillows and mattress.

“I’m fine on pajamas and underthings.” Kylo hasn’t worn pajamas in months and is rather pleased by that. “Casual like…off-duty wear.”

Frakes can’t stop himself from asking, “Are you ever off-duty, sir?”

“I’m not discounting the possibility of it happening.”

“Ah… Okay. Well… Most of the time, if you wanted formal wear, you’d have it made for you. You’d find a tailor, explain what you want it to look like, and get measured for it. Then they make it for you.”

“Okay, and casual clothing?”

Now Frakes is looking at Kylo like he can’t believe he has to explain this, but… “Have you ever been to the F-deck?”

Kylo shakes his head. The _Supremacy_ is _huge._ It’s sixty kilometers across. It’s larger than several major core-world cities, and at its height, before the attack on Starkiller base, held 2.3 million people, and had capacity for 22.7 million more. Before Starkiller, _this_ was Snoke’s main base of operations, and it was built to hold _everything._ He knows that the F deck stretches all the way from wingtip to wingtip across the _Supremacy_ and houses a large expanse of dormitories and apartments for his officers. He’s aware there’s a similar section on the C, D, and E decks for his enlisted men. But he’s never been there. Just like, if you ask someone if they’ve ever been to a part of town that holds nothing for them, they’ve likely never been.

He can feel that Frakes is genuinely stumped by the idea of an adult person who’s _never_ wandered over to the part of the ship that offers things like food and entertainment.

Still, he continues on. “There are markets there, where, if you wanted, you could buy just about anything you might like. That’s generally where we go to get things like off-duty clothing, or books, or food, or… whatever.”

Kylo nods, and then tries to imagine striding over to the F deck and buying clothing.

Frakes is already ahead of him on that. “I know. Not for you. Everyone would talk and you don’t like that.”

Kylo inclines his head. He doesn’t think he’s ever said anything along those lines, but Frakes is attentive enough to have figured out things he’s wanted just by being near him before.

“I’m an awfully good tailor, sir. Clear an hour or so, and I can get you measured and design some clothing for you.”

“Thank you…” He pauses, not sure what Frakes’ first name is.

“Jon, sir.”

“Thank you, Jon.”

 

 

* * *

Kylo is not, by any stretch of any imagination, rare, in ordering some non-work clothing. Many officers and enlisted members of the Order wear whatever they like during their off hours. There is, however, some gossip when Major Frakes personally measures him for a collection of… ‘lounge wear’ that just happens to include a few pairs of _low-waisted_ trousers in gray, tan, and blue, a collection of white, gray, and ecru shirts, a brown leather jacket, and tan boots.

The addition of a blaster and holster, worn low, on his left hip, just feeds the rumors.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, that chapter was fun to write!
> 
> Anyway, judging by last chapter's (and a few earlier bits, too) comments, some of you are a tad nervous about our Reylo relationship hitting the rocks. And, especially, if you didn't follow me from Shards To A Whole, I can kind of see why. There do seem to be a lot Kylo (or Rey) (or both) are emotional turds and fuck each other over stories.
> 
> So, while I intend to write a lot of fucking over, I like writing the (wink, wink) *good* kind of fucking over. The bad kind... I *hate* it. I find it painful to read. I do not write it. There's enough shit coming at these characters from "real world" sorts of things that I have no desire to up the drama with emotional bullshit. 
> 
> Basically, everything I write, the main character will always act (in regards to their relationships with each other) like adults who realize that other person is the most valuable person in their universe, and behaves toward them accordingly. Sure, we're gonna have ups and downs, but in that our characters are magically linked mind readers with an emotional bond, miscommunications, hurting each other for the sake of hurting each other, and behaving like adolescents who thrive on drama are all off the table.


	20. Cold, Dark, and Evil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this one's pretty short, and I *REALLY* like chapter 21 and want to share it sooner, so, YAY Bonus chapter!

2/23/1 Y.O.

 

Rain. More rain. Some days Rey’s sure Lirium is trying to drown her settlement off of the map.

It was luck, or the will of the Force, that she decided to _not_ put any of the buildings on the rocky shore of the lake, because that shore is getting smaller and smaller every day.

And cool. Not cold, but it’s getting to the point where she’s remembering Ahch-To. Poe’s supposed to be bringing warmer clothing for them, and more blankets, and cloth and leather and yarn, and sewing and knitting stuff. Some of the kids are growing so fast that just bringing in new clothing won’t keep them dressed, so she needs the stuff to make clothing.

Not that she’s ever done that before, but… Worst comes to worst, she’ll ask Kylo how to do it, and if they all look like a bunch of little Padawans because that’s the only outfit he knows how to make, well, they’ll look like Padawans.

Though… Thinking about it… She checks her library, and yes, there are books on sewing and how to make clothing. It can’t be _that_ hard, can it?

She can feel Kylo sniggering in the back of her head as she’s pondering that thought. Apparently, he’s looking forward to hearing about her adventures in clothing manufacture.

 

* * *

Cool… Way too cool. If this were dry cool, she’d be okay. Jakku got below freezing most nights, though between the dry air, and the fact that it got well above blood temperature during the day, things like the metal of her home soaked in the heat and stayed fairly warm.

But this… It’s like a cool, wet, blanket that clings to her skin, and permeates her lungs, and she can’t scrub it off, or wrap up in enough blankets to keep it out. It doesn’t seem to bother the kids. Most of them come from places with things like cool, rain, and humidity. Savarah’s actually under the impression that this is what high summer feels like, and Rey very much never wants to set foot on her homeworld if that’s true.

Chewie’s going to be bringing them more heaters for the cottages. They’re designed to stay comfortable in a range between 15-35C, but she’s starting to wonder if the lake’s so cold because it gets _cold_ here.

Rey’s been watching the suns, when they deign to show themselves through the clouds, and like she expected, because they’re at the equator, the green sun has been spending about the same amount of time in the sky each day. The blue one is setting earlier and rising later, and… They may actually have some sort of winter here.

She wonders if there’ll be a day when the grass vanishes under snow. Wonders what it would be like to actually appreciate snow, get to look at it and play in it. If she’d been doing anything else on Starkiller, she’d have wanted to explore it, because she’d never seen it before.

Later that night, Kylo tells her, “If it does, I’ll show you how to make a sled.”

“What’s a sled?”

“Some sort of flat, plate-like thing you use to slide around on the snow. There’s a bit of a hill between the chapel and the lake, you could slide down it.”

“Why?”

“It’s fun.”

She’s not sure how sliding about in cold and wet snow might be fun, but he kisses her forehead, and lets her see a few memories of being a small child on Chandrila. They had snow there. And Han had gotten them a sled. It’s big for Kylo alone, but he and Han fit on it just fine.

“How old are you?”

“Four or five. It didn’t snow a lot on Chandrila. Once or twice a year, tops. They weren’t home most of the time there was snow on the ground.”

She gives him a little kiss.

 

 

* * *

She looks up, watching rain spattering on the dome of her chapel. With any luck _this_ is winter. Potential for sledding aside, she’d rather prefer this is as cold as it gets. Even better if spring is coming soon.

And with any luck, they’ll get through the rest of this lesson easily.

It’s ‘focusing’ time. She supposes it’s meditation, or sharpening their senses, or awareness of the Force, but… since not all of them can do all of those things, she calls it ‘focusing’ time.

Everyone can sharpen their focus, can learn to spend longer and longer bits of time concentrating on something.

It’s a fairly simple… ish… exercise. They’re all sitting on pillows on the floor, as comfy as they can get, and have picked one rock. The goal is to just _pay attention_ to it. And nothing else. Just the rock. Look at the rock, feel the rock, think about the rock, _just the rock_.

It’s okay if they get distracted. Rocks are boring. And Rey intentionally picked something that was boring to do this with. After all, it’s easy to focus on interesting things. But, if their minds wander, it’s their job to bring it _back_ to the rock.

And… She’s doing it, too. Her mind wandering away from her rock to the rain. The steady drumming of tiny patters all over her dome. For some reason that’s a magnet for her mind, and the little black-gray stone in front of her isn’t.

Back to the rock. If she’s going to make them do it, she needs to do it, too.

It occurs to her, that part of why she’s not Mistress Rey, or Teacher Rey, or… anything other than Rey, is that she hasn’t _earned_ the title.

She’s teaching herself as much as she’s teaching them.

 

 

* * *

An hour is more than long enough contemplating rocks. The kids are edgy and jittery and looking to do _something._

She sends them out to go play in the rain, which if they hadn’t just been sitting around contemplating rocks, they’d complain about, but right now, the chance to run around, even in the rain, is welcome.

From inside the dome, she can see the whole settlement, and it’s clear that they need some sort of place for small people to run around and be rough and rambunctious that’s also dry and warm.

Another dome, probably. Big one.

That gets a sigh. A place to run around dry and warm is much lower on the list of things they need than, say, microfarms, or a water processing plant (though Chewie says he’s got a lead on one) or something to store feed for the Faviers in, or the feed, because if she’s right about it getting cold, they’re not just going to be able to graze. And… good lighting for the workshop. And if this sewing thing is going to be part of what they’re going to need to do, she’s going to need space for that, and more lights and…

How can one settlement with fewer than fifteen fulltime people need so much _stuff?_

 

 

* * *

She notices Savarah and Elias, her two oldest, and newest Maji, lingering by the door of the dome.

She waves them over, and they come.

Savarah is unique among the Maji children. She knows, to the day, how old she is. Fifteen in two months. Most of her life, she had parents, a family, people who cared for her. And then a plague went through her town. Bad water they said. After that, she took any odd job she could find in town, until, one day, serving drinks, she ran into a pilot with a smile in his eyes and a spiral on a stone around his neck.

Elias doesn’t know how old he is. Fourteen-ish. Probably. Old enough that he’s getting taller, fast. Young enough to only have a little bit of downy, brown bunny fluff on his upper lip.

“Rey?” Savarah asks, tentatively.

Rey nods at her, interested in what the two of them are conspiring about, what they want to talk to her about without the rest of the children nearby.

Elias is looking at the swirl beneath their feet. “Are you… sure… about this balance thing?”

Savarah nods, intensely. The Church of the Force wasn’t a thing in the neighborhood she grew up in. They were members of the Holy Cyclindia of Eternal Starlight, worshippers of the stars, and this is _not_ what she learned in her weekly devotions. “It… feels like you’re saying it’s okay to be evil.”

Rey grabs the pillow she was putting back, and gestures for them to grab their pillows, this isn’t a two minutes and done conversation.

They settle in, and Rey takes a moment to just _feel_ it. Both to get her own thoughts settled and to figure out how to convey this so it makes sense to them. Finally she says, “What’s evil?”

They both, in their adolescent certainly of a world of only black and white, look like that’s the most appallingly stupid question, ever.

“No, I’m serious. How do you know when someone’s evil?”

“They kill people,” Elias says.

“I’ve killed people. Master Poe has. Master Finn, he killed a lot of them. I’m not sure about Mistress Rose. Chewie’s killed lots of people. Does that make us evil?”

“You did it in the war!” Savarah says, shutting that down fast. Rey isn’t _evil_. The very nice people they’ve met since they’ve been here _can’t_ be evil. Wrong or misguided, that’s possible, but not _evil._

“Yeah, that doesn’t count!” Elias says.

Rey smiles at them, amused by how quickly they’re shutting that idea down. “Okay. What makes a person evil?”

“Killing people when you don’t have to?” Savarah tries.

“Better. But I can tell you, just about everyone who’s killed someone thought they had to do it. ‘Have to’ is _very_ subjective. And, again, let’s look at Master Poe, he made some bad decisions that got a lot of very good people killed when they didn’t need to die, but he was sure that he had the right answer. Is Master Poe evil?”

“NO!” Elias, who idolizes Poe, and wants to be him when he grows up, says, certain, and Savarah, who’s a bit less taken with Poe, but quite fond of him nonetheless, is nodding vehemently in agreement.

“Okay. I don’t think Poe’s evil, either. I think he made some bad decisions. And he thinks he does, too. Wishes he made some different ones. But in that one moment, he was sure he _had_ to do it.

“How about this, my friend… he killed someone he didn’t _have_ to. Everyone in the galaxy is probably better off with him is dead, but he didn’t _have_ to. He could have just stayed put, knelt in place, and let him do what he was going to do.”

“Was the person he killed going to hurt people?” Savarah asks.

“Yes, a whole lot of them, me among them.”

“Then he had to do it,” Elias says.

“No child. He _chose_ to do it. He chose to kill another person, and that one… if he lived… he would have likely killed other people, but not me or anyone I cared for. Did he have to kill him?”

“No?” Elias doesn’t sound like he likes that answer. Or many of the thoughts Rey’s planting in his head.

“No. He didn’t. He made a choice. I think it was a bad one, and these days he thinks it was a bad one,” though she realizes, because she and Kylo have never talked about Han, that she doesn’t actually _know_ that, “too, but he made it. And when he made it, he was sure he _had_ to do it.” Rey pats the swirl under their pillows. “I hope this isn’t an excuse to be evil. I’m afraid it may be used that way, but… The old way… If you stayed in the light, just about anything you chose to do would be ‘good.’ And… I don’t think that works.

“I think it’s about each and every choice. I think it doesn’t matter which set of emotions you use to get to where you’re going, as long as where you go makes things better.” Rey smiles at them. “Now you ask me what better is.”

“What’s better?” Elias asks.

“I don’t know. That’s the hard part. That’s where balance gets tricky. We can all look back and point at something and say, ‘Oh, that was a bad decision,’ but… In just about every case, the person who made that decision thought they were making a good one for good reasons.”

“That’s not comforting,” Savarah says.

“I know. But it’s true. Mostly… I want you to be able to use your powers, your skills, your feelings, all of them, to get what you want and need. I think, if you look for things that build connections, accord, communities, and lives… I think that’s mostly where good lies. I think the things we work on together, making us more connected to each other… I know that can be used for evil, but, I think that’s where the core of good lies.”

“What do you think evil is, Rey?”

She half shrugs. “Intentionally hurting someone, against their will, for your own gain or pleasure. But… I think that’s an action. I don’t think people or things can be evil, they can _act_ evil, but not _be_ evil. Palpatine did a lot of evil. He did it right and left and throughout the entire galaxy. But his rule made for a stable platform where most of the people in the galaxy enjoyed happy, functional lives.” She sighs a little. “Someone, somewhere, benefits from every possible decision made. Knowing that, understanding it, and applying it to the people around you is part of growing up.”

Rey trails her fingers over the dark swirl. “Maybe this is self-serving. I don’t have a lot of dark, but it’s there. You both have your own dark, too. Poe has his. My friend, he’s got his. And… I feel like we’re better off if we learn how to use it, than trying to shove it into the back of our minds and pretending it’s not there.” She pats her lightstaff. “I hope the dark is like this. It’s a tool. And you can use it to defend and build and protect, or you can use it to tear down and kill. And it’s just about what you chose to lay your will and energy to.”

They’re thinking about what she’s saying, and look a little disappointed.

“Would you like it better if I just gave you a long list of rules?”

They glance at each other. “It’d be easier,” Elias says.

She smirks at that. “I agree, it would be. You know where the library pads are. If you want, you can go work on your reading. I can promise you every list of rules you could ever imagine is in there. If you find a handy list of them that apply to every circumstance, feel free to show it to me, I’ll want to read it.”

That gets some stink eye aimed at her. Neither of them much likes reading, or for that matter, long lists of rules.

“So, we… just make our own rules?” Savarah asks

“Everyone does. They may say that God or the Force or the Sages handed them down and made them holy, but, really… We make our own rules. My hope is you learn how to make good ones from your time here.” Rey thinks about that for a moment and adds, “Lists of rules… They tend to be very straight and rigid and unbending. Do this. Don’t do that. Never do this other thing. But, look around you, _feel_ around you, nothing in nature, nothing in the Force, is a bright straight line with a big DO NOT CROSS sign on it. Everything flows and meanders and wanders. So, I think, instead of looking for rigid rules, it may be a better idea to get a feel for the flows around you, and see which ones lead you to places you want to go, and which ones pull you away from that. That might be more useful than rules.”

“By contemplating rocks?” Savarah asks, looking at the floor.

“Eh…” Rey shrugs a little. It’s not like staring at rocks directly leads to wisdom. “The ability to focus on boring things will come in handy no matter what you do next. We good?”

They glance at each other, and then nod.

“Good, go run around some. We’ve got more lessons in an hour or so.”

“More rocks?” Elias asks.

“Nope. Math.”

They groan, but head out to play in the rain. 

 


	21. Disappointment

3/2/1 Y.O.

 

Kylo feels it when the first one sets foot on the Supremacy.

He supposes it had to happen sooner or later. They’re recruiting fast and hard, and new Force sensitives are born or awaken every day.

So, sooner or later, one of them had get swept up into his orbit.

He has the girl brought to him. She’s thin, slightly hollow of eyes and cheeks. Even after a few months with the Order, she’s not recovered fully from whatever they had her doing before. She’s afraid to meet his eyes. That’s also fairly common among the ones who used to be slaves. Though when she does glance up, he sees they’re deep brown-black, like his, going along with her black hair and deep tan skin.

She’s afraid of him, too. Unsure of what she could have possibly done to have the Master call her to his chambers. Afraid of what he might want her to do. He thinks she’s twelve or thirteen. Young enough she likely wasn’t of much interest to most of the men around her, old enough to know what they wanted with the older girls.

Old enough to know he’s one of _them_ , and to be wary of what he may want, _especially_ after asking for her to come to his personal room.

He can read that fear off of her, and winces internally at it.

He kneels in front of her, moving slowly, doing his best to make it clear he’s going to move before he does, so she doesn’t flinch away from him. He tries to keep his thoughts and feelings calm and nonthreatening. She’s not trained, but it’s likely she at least sense what’s in his head.

On his knees, he can look her in the eye.

“What’s your name, child?”

“TR-4487.”

He shakes his head, having wanted her real name. She winces a little at that, fear nipping at her heels, making her knees feel soft. Doesn’t do to displease the master, any master. His teeth grit.

She was a slave or a runaway or homeless, some sort of person who joined the Order. None of the children kidnapped by Snoke as toddlers are allowed to get this thin, so she has to have a name.

“Your real name. You still remember it, right?”

She nods. “Cassandra Andor. I was named after my great uncle.”

“It’s a good name.” Kylo nods, remembering a few stories his mother told once or twice, and making a mental note to put a stop to forcing the people with names to give them up, and then he looks over to his table and chairs, makes sure she looks, too, and crooks his finger, pulling a chair toward them.

She stares at it, and then looks at him, eyes wide. It’s clear she’s never even heard of someone else being able to do it.

“You can do it, too, can’t you?” he says, voice quiet.

“I…” she looks down… “Sometimes. It doesn’t always…”

“And you can feel things… other people can’t?”

She nods. “You’re very angry at my previous owners.”

_Only owners. No one will ever own you again._

She blinks. He doesn’t know if she understood the words, but she certainly got the idea.

“I am. But that’s… Not the point, right now. Would you like to go somewhere and learn how to do it, always?”

He can feel she can’t believe such a place exists.

“It does. There’s a woman there, her name is Rey, and she teaches people like us how to use the Force.”

The child blinks, and looks up at him, eyes bright and fierce. Then she says, “Will I still get to be a _citizen_ after five years?” He can feel how much that word matters to her. She’s never had the chance to be _anything_ before, and she wants it.

He nods. “Yes. I’ll make sure your time with Mistress Rey counts towards your Order service, but you can’t ever let anyone know how you got to her.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not… very popular in some places. Can you keep the secret? Just one day Master Padme found you, and brought you to Rey?”

“I can do that.”

He smiles at her, says, “Wait here.” He goes to his closet, grabs his Padme clothing, and rapidly comes to the conclusion that he can’t exactly change in his bedroom, because she’s just sitting there. He goes to his refresher and changes in there. Kylo glances at himself in the mirror before he goes to the girl. He looks like a rogue. Brown boots, brown trousers, the belt is unique to him, blaster holder for the left hip, lightsaber clip for his right, white shirt, brown leather jacket, brown leather fingerless gloves, and his hair pulled into a little bun, like Rey does.

 

 

He wonders, idly, if this was his father’s idea of Ben Solo. Wonders what he’d think if he saw this, and is suddenly flooded with a sense of approval.

He shakes that off; there’s work to do, and woolgathering in front of the mirror isn’t doing it.

He returns to the girl. “Where are you from, Cassandra?”

“Fest.”

He kneels before her again, waves his fingers, and says, “Master Padme found you and brought you to Rey, to learn the Force.”

Her eyes are hazy, unfocused. “Master Padme found me.”

“Good, child. Let’s go meet Rey.”

Kylo takes a moment to get a feel for where Rey is. By the side of the lake, and then thinks to her, _Meet me in the chapel_. Then he takes Cassandra’s hand, and in a second he’s at Rey’s. “Go off and play. Go meet the others. Let me talk to Mistress Rey.”

She scarpers off, and a moment later, Rey joins him, watching the girl strolling over to where the other children are, on the bank of the lake, working on catching supper.

Rey raises an eyebrow at him. There’s camouflaging his look so he can pass as just another trader, or spy, at night, or, like he is now, several hundred meters away from everyone else, and then there’s grabbing a child off the Supremacy, in his command blacks, and bringing her here.

He sees her understand what he’s done. “She thinks Master Padme found her. The lie won’t hold, not if she sees me in my blacks. She’s too smart for it, but for right now, it’ll do,” he says to Rey.

“You found one.”

“And I’m sure I’ll find more. You do want me to bring them?”

She swallows, hard. This is the first of the acid tests. Then she nods. They’re borrowing trouble, and she knows it. Sooner or later, one of them will know Kylo Ren, and not Master Padme, brought them here. The trick Kylo worked builds feeble memories, poke them, even a little, and they shatter.

But if she means what she teaches… “Every Maji is welcome here, and if that means we get some from the Order, we get them from the Order. I told Poe… well, made him believe, you’re a Resistance member in the Order, not sure what he’s doing next. If you’re our scout there…”

He nods. “I told her her time here would count for her five years of service. Apparently, in addition to money,” Kylo says, dryly, he’d been amused listening to Poe try to figure him out, “Master Padme is high enough ranked he can get someone ‘transferred’ long term, without having it effect their service time.”

Rey chuckles at that. “Handy skill to have.” Then she nods to the children. “Here they wear no mark but that of the Maji, but I’m fine with her time here counting for her time with you. Here we’re all Maji. When she leaves, she can go back to the Order or whatever comes next for her.”

“Good.”

“What’s her name?”

“Cassandra Andor.”

She glances back to the children, a few of them are watching them, though they’re _mostly_ working. She shakes her head and decides to do it anyway. She kisses Kylo quickly. “Tonight. Now, I’ve got to get Cassandra settled.”

He kisses back, squeezing her hand, enjoying this, them, together, in daylight, being seen by other people, even if they are at a distance. “Tonight.”

As she’s stepping out of the chapel, she says to him, “You look good.”

He rolls his eyes and flashes back to his ship.

 

 

* * *

Apparently, it’s a day for visitors at Lirium.

“Chewie! Rose!” Rey takes Rose in her arms, looking at her. “You’re huge!”

Rose glares at her. Seven months pregnant, in a ship, with the gravity set to .7 Gs is lovely. Stepping onto Lirium, with its full G, is like suddenly gaining a full body suit of iron. “Don’t remind me.” She’s rubbing her back. “I hate gravity.”

Finn gently hugs her, and then wraps Rey into a bear hug, swinging her around. “Hello!”

Rey smiles, very pleased to see them. “Hello back! I’ve missed you.” And she has. Getting them back to visit is one of the highlights of her time here.

Chewie’s looking ahead, seeing the ungainly cargo ship that’s parked next to the Falcon. _Who’s flying that pile of shit?_

“I am!” Poe says, jogging up to them. He’d been helping to build another cottage (Their eventual ‘sewing room,’ because apparently, if you’re going to make clothing, you need space to lay fabric out, cut it, and good light for putting it together. At least, when he got done laughing, Master Ren suggested that the lack of such things may have been why they were having such a hard time getting any two pieces of fabric the same size. Rey rolled her eyes at him, but did notice when they moved into the chapel and spread out, it was easier. So, sewing room went onto the list, because even the kids don’t like cutting fabric on the floor.) when the Falcon came slipping down. It took a minute to get everything properly secured before he could leave. Then he looks from Chewie to the Falcon. “Also, really?

Chewie replies, and Poe says, “Well, I suppose it does take one to know one.”

Chewie laughs at that and so does Poe.

“Also, as much as I’d like a sweet little flier with tight action and more guns than I can count, they don’t exactly have _cargo space._ With this girl, BB-8 and I can take pretty much anything, or anyone, anywhere.”

Chewie nods at that. The shape of the game has changed, significantly, for Poe over the last six months, and so has what he flies.

“What’s got you down here?” Rey says. “I wasn’t expecting you for another few weeks.”

 _Leia’s will got settled. Remember those funds the Ygrines ‘gave’ her?_ Chewie asks.

Rey nods. “The not exactly willing transfer of funds.”

_Yes. She didn’t have a good plan for what to do next, when they gave it to her, so she paid people off, clearing the Resistance’s debts, but didn’t buy anything new. There was some left, and apparently, I’m her legal next of kin, so…_

“So we got a med droid and a modular clinic, and we’re bringing it here to set it up!” Finn finishes. Rey can feel that as Rose is getting bigger, Finn’s getting more and more nervous about them floating around in the middle of space with no access to good medical care. Everyone with the Resistance had to be a decent jackleg medic, but there’s a big difference between cauterizing a wound and slapping a bacta-infused pressure bandage on it, and delivering a baby.

“And a house for you, I hope,” Poe says. “I’m fine crashing in my ship, but you three are going to need a home soon.” He elbows Chewie. “You don’t want dirty nappies cluttering up your ship, right?”

_Compared to Waldo and his mates, a baby human won’t be that annoying. It takes them a year or so to start chewing on everything, and their teeth aren’t sharp enough to do any damage._

Rey can tell that Chewie’s looking forward to being a grand-wookie. And that he’s sad that said baby isn’t going to be staying on the Falcon with him. If they’re setting up the med clinic here, it’s because Rose and the baby are going to be staying here, too. For a while, at least.

“Waldo?” Poe asks. He’s hasn’t heard this bit of the story before.

“One of the Porgs,” Rose says. “He and his ladies live with us, and keep us in eggs, which is nice, but they like to chew on everything, which isn’t.”

Poe’s nodding. He knew about the Porgs, just didn’t know one of them had a name. “Waldo has a name but his mates don’t?”

“They look exactly the same,” Finn says, exasperated. “It took me three months to figure out how many of them there were. They’d never all be in the same part of the ship at the same time. I had to catch each one, stow it in our berth, and then search around for another one. The only reason we know which one Waldo is is because he’s half again as big as the ladies.”

Poe laughs at the image of Finn chasing around after a bunch of Porgs, who are, apparently, curious about Lirium, and starting to hop down the ramp of the Falcon to do a bit of exploring.

 _The eggs are tasty,_ Chewie adds.

“Good, we’re looking for tasty here. All fish and packaged food leaves something to be desired,” Poe says.

 _Maybe this time, they’ll decide to stay._ The Porgs always like to go and explore, swim in the lake, catch some fish, but they also, always, seem to know when Chewie’s gearing up to leave, and when he does, they’re back on the Falcon.

“Nah, Waldo’d miss you if you left without him,” Finn says to Chewie. 

Chewie grunts and shakes his head.

“Yeah, you’re right. We’ve still got a few hours of light. Let’s get as much as we can unpacked,” Rey says. “Though, you know, if you decided to not eat _all_ the next batch of eggs, I could see us having a use for some chicks here.”

 

 

* * *

“The Med Droid is still in a box?” Rey says to Finn.

“Boxes,” Finn replies. “They’re 50,000 fewer credits if you put them together yourself. Between R2 and BB they can get him put together, and 50,000 credits buys a lot of medicine.” He glances around; it’s just the two of them in the Falcon’s rear cargo hold. “She hates it when I say anything or look worried, but… That’s part of why I want to be here, now, not weeks from now like we planned. If we can’t get him working properly, we’ve still got time to go find a planet with a decent medical set up that won’t ask too many questions or check our IDs too closely.”

“Are you still wanted?”

Finn nods. “Last I checked, I was still listed as a deserter. Rose isn’t on their lists, but… I don’t want to have to leave her at a hospital alone for fear that some random camera might get a shot of my face and let the Order know where I am. And Chewie… He’s on the Order’s lists, right behind Leia and Poe as the third most wanted member of the Resistance, and he’s wanted in at least two hundred other systems for his various adventures with Han or on his own.”

Rey winces at that. They both remember what Han and Chewie were doing when they met up, and not only did that sort of thing get them in trouble with different organized crime groups, it also put them on the criminal list of most systems they worked in.

Finn sighs. “I _like_ this. This is _fun._ We’re flying fast and free, going from job to job, picking up whatever people want to move. I get to fast talk and make deals, and skirt the law and…” he’s grinning. “It’s _fun._ And I’m _good_ at it. I mean, _really_ good at it. Chewie says I’m a natural born scoundrel.” He sighs again. “But it’s not safe. We took fire on the last two jobs before the Falcon got to hyperspace.”

“Not a place for a baby,” Rey says.

“No. And Rose hates that I feel that way. If it’s safe enough for me, it’s safe enough for them… And… I don’t know. I guess she’s not wrong, but… The idea of them out here knots up my guts, and not in the way they knot up when I’m in danger.”

“Stay here. We need people. We need builders. There’s only so much I can do, even with thirteen children. Just adding Poe to the mix increases our productivity by close to a hundred percent. Some things are just _easier_ with grown up muscles and attention spans. You and Rose and Chewie… We’d get so much done.”

He rolls his eyes. “I know. And I’ll stay for… as long as I can. But Chewie needs a partner, too, and you, and this settlement starve if we don’t keep bringing you goods, and we can’t afford to do that if we don’t take risky jobs. Not enough profit on the boring ones.”

Rey doesn’t like the way that feels, because, of course, she has someone who could make it unnecessary for anyone to do anything even remotely risky to support her settlement. Someone who has specifically said he’d give her pretty much anything she could possibly want here. Someone who… is possibly making their job significantly more dangerous. “You’re smuggling from the Unknown Regions?”

“No!” Finn raises his hands, almost warding off that idea. “Risky, not suicidal. You try to break the blockade The Order has on that border, you better be sure they never see you, otherwise you’re dead. So, no, I’m talking about just their patrols. Ever since the Order got that…” Finn looks like he wants to curse, “hyperspeed tracking device, we skirt _way_ around them. At the first hint of one of their ships, we’re _gone._ Rose has our scanners set to maximum, boosted that, and keeps them _constantly_ looking for anything with an Order call sign. But that’s about not getting caught as a deserter, terrorist, and their ‘friend.’ The people shooting at us are the keepers of whatever local laws we’re trying to break.”

That eases up on her feelings, some. But a system’s fleet of ships can kill you just as dead as the Order’s.

Finn feels what she’s thinking, and nods. “Come on, let’s get this unloaded.”

 

 

* * *

The children really like it when the Falcon crew comes.

Not only do they bring goodies, (Chewie made sure to bring several crates of fresh citronin. Most of the children have never had one before, but they’re all happily peeling off the orange skins and slorping down the bright red-purple sour-sweet fruit inside.) but they have _stories._

So, like most nights they come to visit, they set up bonfires, roast up the fish, and settle in for story time. Not all of the children understand Chewie’s roars, but C3PO can and often does translate.

She can feel Kylo wondering where she is, what she’s doing. Normally, she finishes up with the children and goes to her cottage to “meditate,” but that wouldn’t do for a night when they’ve got this many visitors.

She lets him feel what she’s doing, and why she won’t be suddenly appearing in his ship.

 

 

* * *

_Bonfire night._

Kylo rolls his eyes and grabs yet another data pad, slamming it a bit too hard on the table next to the dinner that’s supposed to be for both of them, but will apparently just be for him.

It’s not that he begrudges her time with—Okay, it is. He begrudges the fuck out of it. Getting done with his stuff, shoving it aside, and then seeing her is the highlight of his day, and just sitting around, with too much dinner for just him, getting colder by the minute, though he stabs at it with a fork and gets to it, because she’s off having roast fish with a bunch of other people while they laugh and tell stories is…

Shit! It’s absolute fucking shit!

He grabs the datapad and slams it into the wall, and the sound of it shattering into a billion pieces is somewhat satisfying, but… he sighs, annoyed. Now he’s got to get copies of what was on that damn thing, because he’s still got to read it. Because his work doesn’t just go away when it’s inconvenient.

Kind of like hers.

He growls quietly, aware of the fact that things like bonfire night and telling stories and _teaching_ are part of her job.

And, okay, no, he doesn’t exactly want to spend a few hours with Finn and Poe and Chewie and Rose and the droids. That’s not a recipe for a good time for anyone, but…

He does. Or, at least, he wants the idea of being able to relax with her, with other people around, and for them to have some sort of… life… outside the confines of his quarters and hers. He wants to be able to sit next to her on the edge of the lake and join story time. Okay, he’s probably not good at telling stories, he’s never tried, but he can damn well _listen_ to them.

 _Then come listen to them_ sounds in his head.

_And get shot at? Start a brawl?_

_I’m not suggesting marching on up and sitting next to me in your full command blacks and mask, but… No one says you can’t listen._

He vividly sends her the image of him rolling his eyes extravagantly. _I can hide in the background. No, thank you._

He feels an answering sense of longing from her, and the image of him sitting on the ground, palms behind him, leaning into them, one leg extended, one bent, foot on the ground, and her sitting between them, back against his knee as the party rolls on.

But they both know that’s not how it would work, and right now, with as fragile as her set up is… She’s not willing to burn any bridges or lose any friends. But, _gods_ as soon as he sees it, he _wants_ it.

 _How late will you be?_ He picks at another bite of what’s supposed to be _their_ dinner. It’s good, or would be if he was sharing it. Somehow roast mushroom pasta loses a lot of its savor when he’s eating it alone.

 _Chewie’s telling us about—_ He feels her pause— _taking out Jabba’s pleasure ship._

Another eye roll. He knows that story is the rescue of Han Solo, and if it’s Chewie’s full version of it, which encompasses everything from Vader capturing Han to the two years they spent planning it, to the year it took them to get everyone into place, to the actual rescue, they’ll be up for hours.

_I’ll take tax revenue reports over that._

He feels the sense of her kiss, and sighs at that, too. He sends one back to her, and then makes himself eat his supper, and summon another copy of the reports.

 

 

* * *

When he’s sitting at his desk, reading yet another report about some bit of idiot minutia that goes into running a functional government, he thinks that Hux was onto something.

He wasn’t meant to be a politician.

He’s probably not meant to be a ruler.

Trying to make himself care about stuff like this is just… exhausting.

But if he doesn’t care about it, if he fobs it all off onto his underlings… Well, he does, a lot of it, but he spot checks things more or less at random to keep them on their toes. No one has the brainpower to keep a galaxy-wide system going strong in his own head, so he doesn’t even try, but just keeping up with the spot checking makes him want to grind his teeth into dust.

He feels like he runs into something on _every_ report. Which means meetings with the people who are supposed to be in charge of these things, and then more meetings, and maybe it gets taken care of, or maybe he’s just found the tip of some conspiracy, or one of his men trying to build his own little empire in the middle of the Order, or…

Usually, this would be about the time Rey would put her hands on his shoulders, kiss him on the back of the head, and then turn the damn datapad off and tell him to come to bed.

And usually, he would, and they’d spend an hour or so playing in his bed or the bath, before shifting back to hers to sleep.

He lets his mind wander to hers, and the stories are still going on. Likely because a quick check at his chronometer tells him it’s only been an hour.

“Fuck it!”

He strips out of his command blacks and yanks on Padme’s clothing. He pulls his hair back, doing a haphazard job of it. But it’s late, enough, and if Padme actually had some sort of job that involved moving around more than shuffling datapads, his hair could fall out of its knot.

He makes a mental note to make sure he gets at least an hour, better yet, two, with the training droids tomorrow. Today, yesterday, and the day before were pretty much all sitting around days, and he can feel that’s part of why he’s so edgy. He needs to move around, hard, fast, dangerous, at least every other day, or he starts to shift out of balance, and _everything_ starts getting to him.

A moment’s concentration brings him to Rey’s cottage.

Another moment of… he’s not exactly pulling up his courage, but… steeling himself, maybe, before he leaves. From the space in front of her door, he can’t see them, but he can hear them, and see the glow beyond the cottages near the lake.

He closes his eyes and focuses. As he was trained, both times, there are skills that fall more readily to the light side of things, and skills that more easily fall to the dark, and skills, like rock floating, that have no alliance to a side.

Fighting, attacking, destruction, deception, raising passions, and sewing discord are all, broadly, dark side skills. And he has a fairly easy time with all of them.

Calming, healing, soothing, negotiating, seeking accord… Those are all, broadly, light side skills. And he could, broadly, fail, at just about all of them. He thinks part of why Luke was so frustrated with him was that he had _no_ talent for most of the light side skills, and even expending a lot of energy, could only get to mediocre at them. Though he wonders now, as he’s finding himself stumbling around with some of these skills, and not being _horrible_ at them, though he’s certainly rough and untrained, if part of continually, always failing at them was Snoke’s fingers tangling through his skills.

There was one light side skill, though… It’s not _exactly_ a deception skill, though it’s close, which is likely why he could do it. It’s actually the light side version of a deception skill. Anyone who’s done any level of Jedi or Sith training knows there will be times when it’s just easier to not be seen. Kylo can’t make himself invisible. (Or if he can, he’s unaware of it.) He can however, make the people around him not look where he is. If, for some reason, a person managed to actually point her face in his direction, she’d see him, and remember him, but, if he’s using his ability to do this, she wouldn’t turn to him.

He was always good at that one. Not invisibility so much as _don’t see me._

It won’t work on another Maji, not one who’s any good at sorting through her feelings and sensing what’s around her. In that case, it’ll actually _draw_ attention to himself, because she’ll feel him manipulating the Force. Rey, for example, will feel him from a kilometer away doing this. And he’s sure some of the other Maji will have a sense of something off, but none of them are well enough trained to focus down onto what. But for the average person, she’ll just never notice him.

He cloaks himself, and then starts toward the light of the bonfires.

It is a party. He can feel the enjoyment from two hundred meters away. He can’t make out distinct voices yet, but he feels Rey sense him and offer him welcome… As long as he stays in the shadows beyond the firelight.

He pulls closer, sees where she got the idea of the two of them at the party. Finn’s on the ground, sitting with Rose between his legs, rubbing her back and hips, listening to the story with interest.

He’s still well in the dark when Chewie stops talking, and looks up, suddenly. He’s staring around, searching, but he can’t find Kylo. Kylo rolls his eyes at himself. Chewie can _smell_ him. Probably smell him well enough to hit him with the bowcaster if he allowed the bolt to hit. But he doesn’t yell, and when Poe and Finn ask what’s up, he says _nothing_ , and goes back to telling the story.

Apparently Rey isn’t wrong about Chewie not wanting to kill him. One growl, and this party would have gotten interesting.

Even at a party, even on a mostly deserted planet, Chewie, Poe, and Finn are wearing weapons, and Rey has her staff near her hand.

He shakes his head, joining in is silly. He’s still _outside._ Eternally outside.

_No, you aren’t._

_You really want to see how exciting this will be if I crash this party?_ He can feel a little thrill at the idea of the fight that would ensue. He’s wearing a blaster and his lightsaber. The blaster is just part of the image he’s projecting. He’s fired one maybe ten times, and isn’t a particularly good aim. But he also doesn’t need to be. His fingers stroke the hilt of his blade.

She feels his image of it, and he gets the sense of disappointment from her. But it’s not just aimed at him. She can feel how fast the balance she’s trying to build would tip out of alignment if Kylo popped up here. She knows that Kylo’s not the only one who would enjoy a no-holds-barred, drop-down, drag-out fight between them.

He also gets a shape, a flash, of a future. He thinks she’s seeing it, but he may, too. A time where he will be able to join her at a group like this.

 _Not eternally._ That’s her voice in his head. _You want me to make my excuses?_

Yes, but he doesn’t think that at her. He’s feeling… something. _No. There’s…_

Her presence in his mind is suddenly very gentle, soothing. _I feel it, too, love._ If she’s thinking at him that tenderly, it’s important. _Go to it._

 

 

* * *

He turns away from the firelight, feeling pulled, out, past the chapel, to the field where the ships wait.

Seeing it, he inclines his head, feeling a wave of _of course._

_The Millennium Falcon._

His father’s one true love.

Like usual when it’s parked, the ramp is down. Anyone could just walk in. So, he does.

There are memories here. A lot of them. While it’s true that it was rare for both of his parents to be with him at the same time, they certainly tried for at least one of them to be around as often as possible. Unfortunately, at least according to the child who was Ben, as often as possible worked out to slightly less than a quarter of the time.

In his mother’s case, that was likely more often than she would have liked. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t want to be with _him_ as it was that every other minute, she, too, was finding some sort of stupid little glitch in her reports and flying all over the galaxy to have meetings and try to fix them.

He supposes a perk of being the _Master,_ as opposed to being a senator, is that his meetings come to him and he sets them to suit him.

Han probably spent more time with him than he liked. Mostly because it was a good excuse to avoid all of the minutia he was supposed to be dealing with.

Instead of sitting around listening to diplomats blather on, Han would come home to visit, and ‘fix up the _Falcon_.’ Kylo’s still honestly not sure if the _Falcon_ is just a terribly designed ship that requires constant, un-ending attention to keep it in the air, or if his father was just a terrible mechanic. (Or some combination thereof.)

Standing at the foot of the ramp, looking up, it’s occurring to Kylo that the ship isn’t nearly as big as he thinks it should be. Of course, most of his images of it come from his childhood, and once, on his knees, looking up at Rey.

Inside, he’s shocked by how familiar it is, and how different. The shape, the smell, the feel of it is the same. He could be six-years-old, sitting by one of the floor plates, handing his father tools.

But it’s not the _same._ The colors are different. The details… Chewie, Rose, or Finn have been playing with it some, refitting the storage chambers… Re-doing the upholstery? He’s almost certain the cushions on the seats in the center lounge weren’t that color before.

There are parts of… He smiles a little; he doesn’t know what it is by looking at it, but he can feel the attention, and dreams that have been going into it, and that lets him know it’s the start of a crib. Finn and Rose have been working on it together, building a place for their child to rest. And bits of it are scattered through the central lounge area. He touches a piece, carefully, not wanting to move it. It’s wood, satin smooth to the touch, and hours of patient sanding and shaping have gone into getting it that way.

He startles away from his thoughts when something… he assumes this has to be a porg, trills at him in a disturbed sort of way. It’s angry at him, apparently it knows he doesn’t belong here. “Shh… I’m Rey’s friend.”

It yells louder and two more of them join him. All three are glaring up at him, tiny pointy teeth bared.

He’s never been any good at this, but… “Shush, Waldo.” (One of them has to be Waldo, right?) And then he lays down a gentle bit of Force, hoping to calm them. And, unlike every time he’s tried this before, Waldo and his friends calm down. They’re still wary of him, but they aren’t yelling.

He bends down, reaching out his hand, and stops a few inches away from the biggest one. Waldo cocks his head, eyeing Kylo, but decides to hop a little closer and get his neck rubbed.

Rey’s right, stroking one of these things, and feeling it purr, is actually pretty nice. Waldo’s crooking his neck, trying to get Kylo to pet him properly, so Kylo kneels, and in a moment, he’s got Waldo in his arms, purring at him.

“Well, at least I can please someone on this damn ship.”

“That’s not fair.”

Kylo’s eyes close, and he rubs his lips together. He doesn’t turn, but he knows the voice behind him. That’s why he’s here after all. He bites his lip again, before saying, “Isn’t it? I certainly never found anything that made you happy.”

He turns to face Han. He’s just as old as he was the last time they met, though he’s much less upset looking. Kylo has to assume that’s true of himself, too.

Han looks him up and down. “I like this.”

Kylo scoffs. “A costume?”

Han rolls his eyes, and Kylo suddenly knows, feels, where he got that from. Because he never really knew his parents as an adult, he’s never internalized them, as adults. So, he’s never felt the bits of him that mirror them, though he is, right now.

“The costume’s nice, too.” Han says with a patronizing smirk. “It’s too neat and tidy and expensive, but it’s nice, for a costume. It’s clear you’re slumming. You don’t have the posture for it, and you’ve got the blaster on the wrong side, too.”

Kylo doesn’t glare at him, but he does say, voice painfully dry. “My saber goes on the right.” He shifts his right arm and Waldo, offering his father a clear view of his preferred weapon. “I don’t go out unarmed, but if _someone_ had taught me how to shoot, the way he _promised_ to, the blaster could have been on the right side.”

A lot of Han’s bravado slips away at that, and more of the real man is visible under the image of Han. His voice is regretful when he says, “I know.” He looks at the blaster, and the ship, and says, “I meant to. All of it.” He sighs again, and nods to Waldo. “You remember that… what was it? Linus… You called it Linus.”

It takes him a minute to remember what Linus was. “My pet zeefir?”

“Yeah. You remember what happened to it?”

Kylo blinks. He had a pet. He knows that, but the memories of it are blurry at best. He was young, four, five, not yet six. He has much clearer memories, from when he’s older, seven, eight, asking for a pet, and both of his parents being very nervous, and then saying no. But thinking back, looking… Linus… It was small and round and fluffy, black and green, with short silky fur, and he’d feed it lettuce and grapes, and it would curl up in his hand and let him pet it. His eyes shut, and he swallows, hard. He’d picked it up too fast, not gentle enough, startled it, and it bit him, hard, tiny teeth cutting into his finger, and he thrashed out, hard, with his body and power, and killed it. It was accidental. He knows that. He hadn’t been trying to… Well, he had. It hurt him, so he hurt it. He just didn’t understand _what_ he’d done to it until he picked it back up and found blood coming out of its eyes, ears, and nose. And when he did, he got so upset he blew all the electronics in their home.  

Han looks at the cradle parts all around him. “We were scared, Ben. You’re right about that. You used to break things, hurt people. You didn’t have the control to not do it accidentally, and you didn’t have the wisdom to not do it intentionally, and… And we didn’t know what to do. And we didn’t want to give up on you, but…” Han’s biting his own lip now. “We were running a race against time and you, trying to find… anything… to get you off that path before you killed someone. Remember that tutor… Master Symns? You choked him so bad… The only reason he didn’t die is you thought you killed him when he passed out so you stopped. No one…” And Kylo can tell he means Leia and Luke, “thought it was a good idea to let you play with the dark. You had enough trouble dealing with it when it was forbidden, and that letting you dabble with it…” Han’s ghost still wears his own blaster. He touches it. “This, the _Falcon_ , flying around, playing fast and loose with the law, making deals that weren’t technically legal. We thought that’d just… invite you to go wild.”

Kylo just feels exhausted at that. Like his joints have gone weak after too many years of running full out. He sits down, slumping into the sofa behind the dejarik table. For a moment, he just stares around the _Falcon_ , and then finally manages to say, “How much worse could it have possibly turned out?”

Han’s face is _old,_ his eyes tired, when he says, “You think I haven’t been beating myself with that for years now?” Han shakes his head. “When Luke told us what happened… I didn’t talk to your mother again for eight years, and I hit Luke hard enough I broke his jaw and knocked out three of his teeth. I never spoke to him again. I still haven’t. He’s out there, I can feel it, but… I let them have you because it was supposed to _work._ I gave you to them because it was supposed to prevent you from…” His voice is shaking at that. “You could have stayed with me, ended up the most vicious pirate to ever fly a ship, and you wouldn’t have done a tenth the damage you did as Snoke’s right hand.” 

Kylo blinks. He hadn’t known any of that. “You… left her?” Their marriage had always been either hot or cold, and usually it was also spread out over a few hundred light years, with each of them in a different quadrant of the galaxy. But it was always _there._

“Left her, left the Republic, left it all. Chewie and I got back in the air and went back to what we were best at. I saw her for a few minutes, before… The last thing she ever said to me was to go get you, bring you home. I told her that Luke, who was supposed to know it all, failed, rubbed it in, and she told me Luke was a Jedi, and I was your father. Closest I ever saw her get to admitting she’d been wrong about something.”

Kylo knows what happened next in that story.

Han sits next to him and, cups his face. Kylo can’t feel it, but he knows what he’s doing, the exact same gesture he did right before he killed him. And he knows what Han’s feeling as he does it, because it’s all right at the top of his mind.

“Twenty-two years… You thought I…”

Kylo swallows, hard, biting his lip… “Thought? _You left me._ You dangled a life in front of me. We were going to learn to fly and shoot, and I was going to be the best pilot in the galaxy, next to my Dad, and then you snatched it away, and _you left me!_ I begged you to come, and you didn’t rescue me. Luke would tell the story of you showing up in the nick of time to rescue him, but you never came for me.” His voice cracks. “You killed the dark creatures trying to shoot him, but you left me flying alone.” Tears are easing down his face.

“I know.” Han’s voice is shaking. “If I’d had the weapon to shoot what was haunting you, I’d have shot it, a million times over, but I didn’t. And trust me, _we tried._ ” A flood of images of Han and Chewie looking for any attack they could try against Snoke pour over him, but there was never an attack that they could get in clean on. Never one with a chance of working.

They’re in almost the same position as they were on Starkiller. Sitting instead of standing, and Kylo’s still holding Waldo, instead of a saber.

Han’s looking into his eyes. “And I tried to atone for it. Last thing I ever did was for you.” He half smiles, but it’s a sad gesture. He leans back, clears his throat, sniffs, and then looks Kylo up and down, and he half-inclines his head. “Rey’s done more. Nothing like a pretty girl for that, but… I didn’t fail you, not in the end. That was the crack she needed to work her way in.”

Kylo can remember Snoke saying that killing Han had ripped his soul apart. He knows that’s not actually true. Whatever soul he has or had was more or less the same. It ripped his illusions apart. It let him see that anger wouldn’t make things better. It was the first real moment of doubting Snoke. He’d done as he’d been told, proven himself again and again, but the promised relief didn’t come. It never came. Test after test after test, and he passed them all, but it _never_ came.

And when Rey was looking up at him, and Snoke was droning on, he knew another kill on his list wouldn’t give him peace. It wouldn’t let him settle, untroubled into the dark.

Because _dark_ wasn’t what Snoke wanted for him.

Snoke wanted evil. And Rey can talk about evil being actions and not people, but… Snoke wanted to turn his dark to evil, he wanted evil soaking through his every muscle and nerve. He wanted evil to define every aspect of his life, because he knew every strike, every hit, every jolt, every pain, all of that just increased his dark.

_Raw, untamed power._

And that old fucker was using him as a battery, pulling strength from his torment.

Kylo’s a creature of the dark. There’s no two ways about that. He always has been dark and always will be dark. It calls to him, and he can feel it burning in his blood and skin anytime a fight gets near or an insult is offered. Dark requires very little effort from him, which isn’t true of light.

And so was his father. He spent his whole life dancing between the light and the dark, a lot of it on the dark side of things. Even when he was on the “good” side, he certainly wasn’t doing it from a place of calm, serene agape. He was in it for his friends, for his love, for his money, to save his own ass. He fought by and for his attachments, his passions. No high, lofty political goals. No love for the Rebellion or the ideal of Republic. Just his emotions. His hate for the Empire, his love for Chewie, and Leia, his attachment to them.

And if he’d had the chance to go off with him… Kylo wipes his eyes and looks around the Falcon. “I would have been a good scoundrel.”

Han half laughs at that, and then nods. “Probably. It’s not too late, you can still find out.”

Kylo sighs, makes a sound that could almost be called a laugh. “I’ve kind of got this other job…”

Han smirks at that. “That’s your mother.” Then he shakes his head… “You are such a mirror. Vader’s darkness. Leia’s light.” He winks. “My good looks.”

Kylo rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “Your jokes were always terrible.”

Han grins. “Your son will think the same thing about yours.” Then he grows more serious. He pats Kylo’s face again. “And if the time comes, you’ll have learned from my mistakes.”

Kylo nods, solemnly this time. “And your sacrifice.”  

“Good. Unless you want to explain to Finn why you’re in here, it’s time to get moving. They’re breaking up.”

Kylo blinks, and Han is gone. He puts Waldo down, and leaves the Falcon, quickly.

 

 

* * *

Rey’s already back in her cottage when he gets there. But she didn’t beat him by much. She’s only got one boot off.

“Aren’t there still three hours left in the thrilling tale of Luke’s idiot plan?” he says as he slips in.

She just looks at him.

“Come on, I’ve heard that story fifty times. Luke’s plan gets dumber every time I hear it. ‘And then I decided to give the droids to Jabba, because I had the feeling I’d need them there. R2 of course knew what was up, but Threepio was bad with secrets, so I had to keep him in the dark, and…’” He rolls his eyes. “Lando had a plan, too. Get in, get back against the wall with Han, set up a dampening shield, toss the bomb, blow everything up, and then walk away from the rubble with him still frozen, then thaw out nice and easy later. If some bits of him shattered in the explosion, well, the Rebellion had a perfectly good medical cruiser, and Luke was doing fine with a prosthetic arm.”

Rey doesn’t want to admit that as plans for a rescue goes, it does seem to be an absurdly complicated one. Though… she supposes that Luke may have, just possibly, known what he was talking about when he said not to ‘magic’ something just for the sake of ‘magicking’ it. “Rose was half asleep, and the younger kids were getting drowsy. Chewie’ll tell the rest of it tomorrow night.”

Kylo nods, pulling off his boots and jacket.

Rey’s watching him, waiting to see how his part of it had gone.

He doesn’t shrug. He does finish taking off his boots and jacket, and snuggles up next to her on the extra-large chair in her main room. For a moment. Then he gets up and grabs the extra blanket from her bed, the one that used to live on his bed. It’s getting cooler every day, cooler yet at night, and in his Padme wear, once the jacket is off, he just has trousers and a light shirt.

She stands up, waits for him to get settled, and then snuggles in on his lap, wrapping the blanket around both of them. He’s still not talking, so she says, tentatively. “You don’t feel angry.”

“I don’t. Not sure what I feel right now, but not angry.”

She rests her head on his shoulder, and he kisses her forehead. He’s thinking and feeling, trying to put the last hour or so into some sort of perspective.

“You asked me why I hated him.”

She’s gently stroking his chest, taking advantage of the v-neck on his shirt to just pet him skin to skin. “I like this. You not covered from chin to toes.” She gives him another little stroke, touches the Maji pendant on his chest, and he kisses her, not minding the digression. Some things are easier to go at sideways. But she does get back to the point. “And you said you didn’t. I didn’t believe you then, and I still don’t.”

 

 

He half inclines his head, and rests his chin against her for a second before saying, “I didn’t _just_ hate him. If I’d just hated him… I don’t know… Maybe I wouldn’t have killed him. Hate is… hot and bright and steady and _easy._ It just is. It expects nothing and leads to nothing and there’s just power and pain.”

“Doesn’t sound easy to me.”

“Probably not.” He looks away from her, across this small room to the kitchen table, trying to imagine a future here, with little kids, with the son who thinks his jokes are terrible. He doesn’t see it, because the image of a small child, with dark unruly hair, and too much nose, two feet on his foot, arms tight around his knee as he thumps around with him overwhelms it. It doesn’t shift, but his perspective does, and he becomes the boy, because he was the boy.

“I wanted to be him when I was little. Before I knew what a Jedi was, or who Uncle Luke was, or why my parents were rarely around. I knew he was the best pilot in the galaxy, and he’d fly around far and fast, and I was going to be just like him.”

“I saw that memory. You on his lap, in the Falcon.”

He nods. “Yeah.” He rubs his face against the top of her head. “It never went away, you know? It’s not like one day I said, ‘No flying for me, I’ll become a Jedi.’ I got to work in the Falcon when he was home, but we didn’t go joyriding in it. I’d probably been begging for years, and I finally get to fly in the damn thing, but he’s dragging me off to Luke, where I don’t want to go.” He closes his eyes, wincing. When he got upset, he’d blow the power on things, fry the electronics. That’s why they never went joyriding, why Han didn’t have him up in the air practically before he could walk. He didn’t want to risk taking him in a ship unless it was absolutely necessary.

He slumps a bit more as he adds, “And he didn’t teach me how to shoot. He was supposed to. He promised to.” But, again, don’t want to play with guns with the kid who can’t be trusted to hold one without hurting you. Not enough control to avoid doing it accidentally. And Ben had _lots_ of accidents. Not wise enough to not do it on purpose. And Ben had a temper that was always simmering away. If someone hit him, emotionally, literally, or metaphorically, he always hit back and _hard._

“And we didn’t go over how to plot a course without a navi computer. He could do that in his head, you know? If the computer in the _Falcon_ was going too slow, and he needed to get out of there fast, he’d just punch it, finish the calculations while they were in hyperspeed, and update it on the fly, because he could do it.” He bites his bottom lip, remembering an argument. “It was so fucking dangerous, and she hated him doing it. Hated him talking about it, even. Didn’t want him _encouraging_ me, but… It saved their lives a few times.” But Ben never did get good enough at math to do that. To even do it slow, on a pad. Luke didn’t teach much math, probably didn’t know how to do that sort of calculation himself, and he certainly wasn’t messing around with math texts on the _Finalizer._

“We didn’t get to simple math, like how to figure the price on a trip, taking into account the fuel costs and where you were coming from and going to. Like, you could offer a lower price if you could pick up something worth moving at the end spot, but if it was just a barren rock, the cost had to cover the trip back…”

He stops talking, looking far away, not really seeing the room around them. A million goodbyes, that’s what he’s seeing, cast over and through the last one.

“You were disappointed?” Rey says, tentatively.

He nods. “Yeah. And envious. He got the life I wanted. He got to fly the skies and go wherever he liked, join whatever he liked, live however he liked. He made his own rules and didn’t have to live up to anyone else’s expectations.”

She hugs him a little tighter.

“I hated Luke. I would have killed Luke if I’d had the chance. For a heartbeat there, I thought I had. That was the best fucking second and a half of that month. I hated Hux, and I ran him through with my lightsaber while holding him up by his neck, and then snapped it with my own hand. I hated M’Gll, and I took her head off the day I left Luke’s school. There are more; the list is longer than it should be. And I’ve given exactly no thought whatsoever about those kills after them.

“Just things I did. Like swatting a fly…” He shrugs a little. “More like scratching an itch. Something that satisfied a need, but wasn’t worth a second thought.

“But I still think about killing him, and Snoke.”

That she wasn’t expecting.

He snorts a little, self-deprecating. “Ben’s father and Kylo’s. I killed them both. They both disappointed me. They both told me lies about the life I would have with them. They both lived a life I wanted.”

She strokes his chest again.

“Hate burns bright and vanishes. Once you’re done, you’re done.” His eyes close, and he curls in against her. She can feel the thought he doesn’t give to words. _Disappointment is forever._ “I would have rather hated him. We’d be done if I’d hated him.”

Rey doesn’t know what to do with that, and Kylo doesn’t either. They spend a moment just sitting. Feeling.

“You’re hopeful, and afraid.”

He nods. “Tiny little spark of it. Like maybe this time, he won’t disappoint me.”

“He won’t.”

“Likely, because I don’t need anything from him anymore.”

She kisses him, deciding not to call him on the lie.

 

 

* * *

 _Well?_ Chewie asks when the _Falcon_ is quiet and Finn and Rose have gone to bed.

“No new holes in me, so given our track record, I’d say it went well,” Han replies, his ghost settling in next to Chewie in the cockpit.

He listens to Chewie’s response and says, “Yeah, I know. My expectations are so low they’re in danger of melting from the heat of the planet’s core. I’m just saying, it could have gone worse.”

Chewie snorts at that.

“Look, I’m not asking you to make nice with him. Still, I’m the one he stabbed, and if I can get past it…”

Han nods at Chewie’s reply. “Well, yes, I do have more of a vested interest in it than you do.”

Chewie sounds off for a long time.

“I know that, too. We did the best we could, with what we knew, and it wasn’t enough. Maybe there was nothing that could have been enough. We’ve known enough drunks over the years to know sometimes you’ve got to break before you can change. Doesn’t mean I don’t feel like I should have done more. And this… Maybe there’s finally a chance for more.”

Chewie doesn’t say it; he just looks at Han.

“Yeah, I’d hug you, too, if I could.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've got a lot of thoughts on this one, often shaped by the discourse on the Solo family. So, first of all, everyone was doing the best they could. I've seen so many Han and Leia were shitty parents posts out there, so... 
> 
> A: Not in my verse. They weren't bad; they were *wrong.* They made the gamble, and it backfired spectacularly. I wish I remembered the name of it, but there's a fic out there where Ben has some sort of mental illness, and Leia sends him off to boarding school that treats kids with all sorts of art therapy, but the guy who runs the school, Snoke, is abusing them. I feel like that's a really good read on any real world take on this situation. They sent him to their best chance at getting him help, but the demons they were trying to get him away from followed him there. 
> 
> B: They're in the middle of an ongoing war. They have legitimate reasons to not be with Ben all the time. Kylo still doesn't quite get that, but we'll get there. 
> 
> C: Even without Snoke, Ben Solo would have been a difficult child. His own baseline, just based on how sensitive he is and his dark nature, is anxious and depressed. Especially as a kid, this little guy would have needed a lot of gentle petting and coddling and attention, and he just didn't get it. That said, in my 'verse Ben Solo was a legitimately dangerous child to be around.
> 
> D: Add in a manipulative psychic-vampire pulling off Ben's pain and power, and that is going to be bad. We don't get a lot of backstory on Snoke, but I'm thinking he's some sort of psy-vamp. (Or whatever the Force equivalent is.) Snoke's untamed power line... Look, no sane ruler wants that. Untamed power is dangerous to you and everyone else. You want tamed and controlled power, lots and lots of it. (i.e. Vader.) The guy who wants untamed power is the guy who's using you as a psychic battery. And from the looks of it, whatever Snoke was teaching Kylo, it wasn't anything to *tame* him.


	22. Amidala

4/7/1

 

Kylo’s standing at Rey’s workbench, staring at the fundamentals of a light short sword. Unlike Rey, he built his lightsaber, instead of inheriting it. So, he’s done this before.

And, he’ll have to admit it tickles him to no end when she finally asked him for help putting one together. She’s never run into a technical problem she can’t just _fix._ And especially with her staff to build off of, she feels like this should be fairly easy.

She can see what all the parts look like, and how they should work, so the fact that all she can get is a small fizzle, or one time, the tip of the sword burst into flame, is frustrating her to no end.

So, he’s standing there, next to her, looking at the assembled case in her hand, the power device on the bench, and the crystal in his hand, feeling fairly smug. The first thing he says is, “Part of it is this is a _dark_ crystal.”

“No, it’s not.” It’s not Dark. It is dark.

 

 

“I mean it’s a really dark color.” He lifts it to the light, letting it hover above his palm, but he still can’t see through it. “Whatever this is, it’s going to take a lot more energy than a light crystal, like the one in your staff. Even my crystal isn’t this dark.” Once upon a time, his was one solid piece, and blue. It’s not anymore. It cracked shortly after he left Luke, blooming red and jagged, and burned through most of his original casing. The one above his hand is almost black, and he’s never heard about a kyber this dark, so he’s got no idea if it even can be used for this kind of work. It does have a somewhat pleasant thrum to it, the feel of the energy buzzing through his hand makes him feel like he’ll get along well with whatever weapon this makes.

Granted, as of this point, he’s never met a blade, not even M’Gll’s, that didn’t seem to like being in his hand. Any kyber capable of being set to this sort of work gets along well with him.

“Isn’t the one in my staff your original saber?”

He blinks at that, and then remembers, he’d told her that saber belonged to him. “No.” And he realizes she’s seen that fight with Luke, so she knows he had a blue saber at one point. “That one is mine by right. Vader took that with Luke’s hand, and as his protégée...” It sounds stupid to him, now. “But it’s not my original one.” He lays his saber on the workbench. “Most of this is my original saber. The crystal changed along with me. Got more powerful, cracked, became less stable. I had to add the heat vents to the sides to deal with the amount of energy a cracked crystal lets off. But I built the skeleton of this when I was fourteen.”

She glares at the pieces in front of her. “So, you’re saying I can’t manage to figure out technology a teenager could handle.” She’s gritting her teeth.

He looks at the light saber hilt she’s opening. It’s attractive. The colors are nice. But he knows metal and whatever this is… It’s not going to do the job. “I don’t think anyone could do it with this. Your alloys are shit. Melt point is too low. Too brittle. It’ll turn to slag or shatter before you can get a decent blade out of it. And that’d be for a light crystal. The kind of energy you’ll have to pump through this one…” he looks at her energy source, sitting on the charging disk… “And this sad little thing could barely coax a blade out of a clear crystal, it’s not going to do it with this one.”

Rey’s gritting her teeth, harder. He can feel her frustration. She’s got the best alloys she could scrape together, without scavenging from the _Falcon_ or Poe’s ship. Same with her power source. She doesn’t want to tell Chewie or Poe to go looking for better stuff, because it’s so expensive.

He figures that if he’s giving her bad news, he might as well get it all out. “And you don’t have the tools for it.” He glances at the mini-welder in her hand. Her _ungloved_ hand. If she can hold the welder in bare flesh, it’s not hot enough. “This thing can’t get the kind of heat you need to melt the solder that can stand up to the heat of your blade.”

She glares at her tools. He doesn’t have to say it. Her mini-welder is more than hot enough to melt the solder she’s got, which means part of why her short swords keep falling apart is her solder keeps melting.

“Tomorrow night, bring the crystal with you to the _Supremacy_. I’ve got the tools and materials you need in my bench.”

“Of course you do.”

He touches his saber, feeling very close to Han for a moment. “It’s an old design, kind of tetchy. I spend more time fiddling with it than I should have to.”

Rey offers him a little smile at that, also feeling his sense of the connection there.

 

 

* * *

The next night, standing at his workbench, watching her fiddle with the design, which is coming along a lot better now that she’s got first rate tools and materials, Kylo’s thinking about how little this costs him.  

And he knows that she wants to build her settlement herself, so he hasn’t dropped a troop of Order engineers on her settlement, along with a freighter of supplies, and had them build her a first class colony. But it would take him less than twenty minutes to make sure that everything she could ever possibly need or want ended up on Lirium.

Except of course, the need to do it herself. That’s the one thing he can’t do for her.

He’s watching her carefully set the crystal, and begin shaping a casing around it. With good tools and good materials she’s whipping through this, fast and elegant. If she’d grown up on any core world, she’d have been an amazing engineer.

She snaps the case shut, and says, “Test one.”

He grins at her, and steps back. The first time he lit his own saber, he just about took his eyebrows and bangs off. His field was significantly less contained than he was expecting. “Don’t point it toward your face when you light it.”

She rolls her eyes and flicks the switch.

They both _hear_ it hum, but… There’s no visible blade. Kylo almost has an urge to pass his hand over it, but he’s awfully certain that’s a bad idea. He can _feel_ it’s doing something. Rey’s just staring at it.

“You can’t see it, can you?” he asks, as he watches her stare.

“No, but… You feel it, right?”

“Yeah, it’s doing _something._ ”

“Get the lights, and the window, okay?”

He does, and as soon as the transteel window goes opaque, he sees it.

“Wow. I didn’t know…” He can feel the way she’s staring at it. He’s staring at it, too. It’s… he doesn’t have words to describe it.

 

 

“That’s a… black light,” Rey says.

He turns the lights back on, and it goes back to invisible. “That’s a black light, all right.”

She turns it off. “I don’t think this is the sort of thing I can train children with.”

“No. They’d need to see the blade.” He’s grinning, picking it up, feeling it solid and real in his hands. “A master though…”

“Hey! I made it.”

He’s still grinning. It’s not his saber, but if feels awfully right in his hand. And he can dual wield… “But you’ll let me use it, right?”

She kisses him. “Yes. Feel good in your hand?”

He’s holding it, swishing it around a little, unlit. “It really does. Smaller than anything I’d normally use, but, especially for an off-hand weapon, it’s good.”

“At your size, it’s practically a lightdagger.”

It’s not _that_ small on him, but it’s certainly smaller than anything he’d normally use. However, there’s something to be said for expanding your routine. “It’s not a bad plan to have a hidden weapon.” He tests it, and yes, it’d fit well against his forearm, on his sleeve if he needed something like that. He hands it back to her. The hilt fits better in her palm than in his, but he’s got the sense that he gets along better with the crystal than she does.

“You know… you can’t really dual wield with a staff.”

That gets an arched eyebrow from her.

“Just saying, that’s a two-handed weapon. My saber’s a one-and-a-half-handed weapon.”

She knows what he means by it, but it’s a term she’s never heard.

“Use it one-or-two-handed,” he expands on the concept of one-and-a-half-handed.

“You really want this, don’t you?”

He pets the casing again. “It just… feels right.”

She turns it on again, and again, in the light, the blade is invisible. But the feel of it… She’s sure it’ll cut through things that her and Kylo’s main weapons struggle with. “It’s got a lot of power to it.”

“That’s probably why I like it.”

“Not that it’s black?”

“That helps, too.” He gently strokes the back of her neck, and she places it back on the bench.

For a few minutes, they work on tidying things back up. Kylo’s picky about his tools. He likes them kept in pristine condition and put back in the right place, every time. They’re good tools, master’s tools, worth more than half of her settlement, and they deserve that sort of respect.

He can remember the feel of her frustration at the cost of good materials…

He could help with that.

It wouldn’t be doing it for her… Just… helping her do it herself.

“Would you take credits from me?”

She looks up from tidying and blinks, startled. She’s usually at least partially aware of what he’s thinking, especially if they’re standing less than a meter away from each other, but she’d been so concentrated on cleaning up and enjoying having mastered the blade, she’d lost touch with any of his thoughts.

“You took it from my mother, and from Chewie, and from the rest of the Resistance, why not from me?”

Put that way, Kylo’s offer of money makes a lot of sense.

“How balanced can this place possibly be if all your funding comes from one side?”

And that makes even more.

“And you’re barely making any progress. You need money!”

More or less hammers it home. And, of course, she wants to keep Finn and Chewie safe, and the less money they need to bring in, the less danger they have to be in, so… “Okay.”

Kylo was gearing up for yet another reason why she should take his money, and the okay, that fast, surprises him some. He’d been figuring it’d take at least a few more reasons before she got to admitting that maybe he had a point.

“Okay?”

“Okay.” She nods. Though they can both feel she’s unsure about this.

“How much do you need?”

“Ten thousand?” Rey has two issues on this. She’s not entirely sure what things cost, in terms of credits, _and_ she’s not entirely sure what she needs to keep moving forward.

He rolls his eyes. “Think bigger.” Kylo’s also not exactly sure what things cost, because he doesn’t _buy_ things, but he does get reports on the Order’s expenses, and he knows ten thousand credits does pretty much nothing. “That’s one earth moving machine, or a barely functional speeder. Don’t tell me what you need to get tomorrow’s job done, tell me what you need to finish this.”

“I…” she turns so she’s back to the bench, leaning against it. She can’t explain why the idea of asking for more than that makes her so uncomfortable. Beyond, of course, the most obvious level of having to explain where she got it.

Kylo steps in front of her, resting his hands on her hips. “Rey, I have everything I’ve ever wanted or needed, and all I have to do is ask. And a lot of the time, I don’t even have to do that. Just noticing I need something seems to conjure it. They’ve been paying me a salary, not a huge one, but a salary still, since I joined Snoke. But I don’t _buy_ things. I pay no rent. I don’t shop for food. Clothing just appears in my closet. My medical care is taken care of. Even fripperies, if I say I want something, it just appears.” He looks over her shoulder to the bench behind him, half-covered in first class tools and materials. “I didn’t even have to ask for that. It was just here when I started using these rooms. I’ve got nine years of income just sitting around and nothing to do with it. Let me transfer you the credits.”

It’s completely rational, so she says, “Okay,” but she’s still feeling a little off by having done so.

He decides to do it first, and then deal with why she’s so unsettled by this. He turns, crosses his room, finds one of his personal datapads, and is opening his account as he walks back to her, standing next to her, hip to hip, he then looks at her, expectantly.

She looks back at him, blankly.

He groans. “You don’t have a bank account. Of course not.”

She shakes her head. “All in currency.” She hops up, so she’s sitting on the workbench, and he wraps an arm around her, tucking the datapad into his pocket.

“Why don’t you want my money?” he asks, kissing her shoulder. “Because it’s the Order’s?”

She shrugs a little, and decides this isn’t a good place for this conversation. This is a face to face, not side to side conversation. She hops down and pulls him to his bed, and nudges him, so he’s sitting on it. Then she sits in his lap, facing him, hands on his chest. Her lips open a few times to start to talk, and then on the third try she puts it together. “You and I have always been equal. I help you. You help me… We balance. I’ve always been able to offer as much as I take. And for this… I can’t. You’ll never get this back. I can’t repay it. I can’t offer you anything of commiserate value. I can’t… trade… for it. Chewie, Poe, the rest of them, I’m building them a place to hide. None of them are ever intending to be upright, law-abiding Citizens of the Order, or anywhere else, so they’ll need an off-the-charts hideout. But I’m not building anything for you, not there.”

He stares at her, not saying what he’s feeling, _You’re building my home, and the safe, secure, surrounded by people who love them home, for my children. The place where they can grow up far away from this. The place they’ll never be dragged away from._

She feels it, and nods.

He looks away, breaking the heaviness of that moment, and then pulls out the pad, tapping it. “You don’t have another name, do you?”

“Just Rey.”

“And you’re not in any system… You wouldn’t be.”

She shrugs at that. It’s possible the same people who sold her for drinking money could have registered her birth, but they likely didn’t. “I can’t imagine I am. Or if I am… learning that would likely cause trouble. I don’t want to put my retina or finger pads into a computer to see who comes up.”

He nods at that. “Do you want a name?”

She touches the token hanging from his neck. Her eyes drift to his as her finger lingers on the disk. She wants him to know she understood, and agreed with, the value he feels coming from what she’s building. “I have one, and when the time is right, I’ll claim it.”

He understands what she’s saying by that, smiles at it, kisses her, and replies, “Ren or Padme?”

 

 

She smiles back at him. “Ren.”

He shudders with pleasure. It shouldn’t still get to him, but it does. It always does. Every time she uses his name, every time she does something like this, accepts who he chose to be, it just floods him with warmth and approval and belonging.

His hands stroke over her arms, and he kisses her, warm and happy.

When she pulls back, she says, “Speaking of names, when you said Padme, it triggered a faint memory. It took me a while to hunt it down, and a while longer to find the links, but… I was reading a theory on the fall of the Empire, and it talked about a senator from Naboo, Jar Jar Binks, and how he was the one who ushered in the final vote giving Palpatine supreme power. He had a co-senator, one who did not agree with the War Powers act, and who was actively fighting against the rise of Palpatine, Padme Amidala.”

He feels a thrill of _right_ all through him at that name.

“She was the elected queen of Naboo, and after that, was a senator in the Republic, and was known for being closely allied with the Jedi.

“She died within days of the Jedi purge, pregnant, unmarried. Her child died with her. No one knew who the father was, or at least, not in what I could find. It was considered something of a scandal at the time, Naboon culture frowning on that sort of thing.”

Kylo feels the sense memory of that. The Force pulling him back to a blurred image of a woman with dark hair, a beautiful face, and so, so sad, drowning in sorrow, letting it squeeze her heart and steal her breath. He yanks out of that memory, fast, feeling that if he lets it, it will choke him, too.

“Amidala…” he’s almost tasting the name. “That’s… right. The child… children, didn’t die, obviously, but…” And he has a flash of that, too. Fear, the need for protection. He doesn’t know who’s feeling the fear… Soft, gentle hands, sorrow, the sense of very calm, very deep Jedi power… Holding… his mother… The hard, cold knowledge that the threat was out there, and stronger than whoever was holding her. “They needed to be hidden away. Palpatine would have had them killed if there had been even a hint of them.”

That’s another heavy topic, and he feels it settle around them. He can feel the memory, but he can’t focus on his grandmother’s face. She has one, it’s in his view, but it’s a blur. There’s just feelings. “He said I have her eyes.”

Rey shakes her head, not disagreeing, just indicating that she doesn’t know. “There weren’t any pictures.”

He inhales, deeply, searching the line of feelings back through his mother, but there’s not much there. What does a baby know of its mother? Warm and red, a blurred face, and apparently, sorrow. “I have access to what’s left of Palpatine’s records. He kept intelligence on… everyone and everything. Maybe he has something.”

She shrugs at that, no idea what Palpatine may have had, or has left.

She feels the flash of resolve through him, before he moves. 

Kylo takes the pad out of his pocket and clicks on it, moving through pages, reading, moving more, clicking, and then looks up at her. “Kylo Ren was added to the register as a person nine years ago. He’s not attached to the Ben Solo person, not a name change or an alternate persona, though I suppose if you put my prints or retinas in, both would come up. Like everyone else in the galaxy, just a few clicks changes a name.” He clicks something and then types, and clicks again, presses all five of his right fingertips to the pad’s screen, and lowers his eyes to the camera for a retina scan. “Unfortunately, I’m sure at least a hundred people are watching any and all changes to Kylo Ren.” He looks up at her. “On this ship alone. Ben Solo though, has been sitting there for nine years, doing nothing. Snoke forbade anyone from ever using that name again, but he didn’t have it erased from the register. So, legally… Ben Solo is still a person, with retina and finger marks on file.” He hits one more button, and presses all five of his right fingers to it. “But today…” Kylo clicks once more, and then looks up at her, “he officially became Ben Amidala. Adding a person to the register takes a few moments.” Kylo puts the pad into her hands. Then he looks at her, eyes hot, intense, feeling the hot slither flush of the words he’s about to say, “Would you consent to be Rey Amidala? Join the register as my wife? Let me name myself your husband?”

 

 

She feels the lump in her throat, and knows that any sound she tries will come out as a croak. So she nods, vigorously, and then scoots forward and kisses him, pushing every emotion into that kiss. 

He knew she would say yes, but he still thrills at the feel of it. A _wife._ A _family._ A person who knows him inside and out and chose him anyway.

His hands tangle in her hair, and she wraps her arms around him, and for a breath they break the kiss, just looking at each other, feeling this moment, the thrum of _now_ and _right_ building between them.

Then they rush to each other again, lips caressing, bodies grinding.

Too much clothing… Too much distance between them. A wisp of silk a micron thick would be too much distance, right now.

There’s tugging and shoving and pulling, and eventually their clothing is gone, and she’s back in his lap, and there’s the rush, the need for _now,_ for more touch and more skin and more glide and… She slips onto him and they both groan, loud, at that, and there, settled, together, her body wrapped around his and his body supporting hers, they can slow down.

From there there’s the supple glide and the wet slip of a gentle rocking thrust. There’s the wet graze of his teeth against her breasts, and the dull pull of her fingers through his hair.

There’s building friction earned one stroke at a time, one long, shivering pull or push or pull again as she rises and falls against him, and his hands cup her thighs, pulling her up, and slowly lowering her down, both of them working together, keeping the glide as effortless as possible.

There’s the sound: counterpoint moans, his deeper, hers higher, broken by fast, deep breath, and the wet glide of skin on skin and lips on throat.

His head falls back at the tug of her hand in his hair, and she lays her own line of kisses down his jaw and throat and chest, tracing the mark she branded him with almost two years ago now. Neither of them knew it then, though they do now, that that’s the day she marked him as hers. The day her light began to seep into him.

 

 

His hand tightens on her shoulder, on the ghost of the mark the Praetorian guard left on her, when they fought back to back, protecting each other and their future, and though neither of them knew this day was coming, they’d both seen hints of it in the shape of things to come.

He’s not kneeling, can’t be, not for this position to work, but when she finishes her line of kisses, he’s looking up at her, hair wild, eyes dark, face entirely open to her. It calls memory back to another day, kneeling on the floor of an empty Rebel base, looking up at her, eyes still begging her to join him. The day his darkness caught her.

Their lips meet again, eyes closing, sight vanishing and feeling taking over. Glide and burn, stroke and tension, rising pleasure, rising passion, the need for _more._ More speed, more touch, more pleasure, more kisses, more _each other._

Like often, when they commune deep and present, the line between his mind and hers falls away, and both of them find it difficult to know who’s feeling what, but right now, it doesn’t much matter. There’s motion, and pleasure, soul-deep pleasure suffusing each muscle, each nerve, each breath, and love, so much love.

It gathers and swells, rises, seeking to crest, but not… quite… lulling, slow, waiting for ripeness and fullness, kisses passed from lip to lip, soft words unspoken but felt, and then rising again, higher, and again, and again, he’s not even sure if they’re still moving, or just riding the wave, swell and pulse, breath and moan, and once more, higher, yet.

And when the wave crashes, it leaves both of them limp, collapsed, breathless, stars dancing behind closed eyelids, contentment quieting any nagging voices that could even dare to think of disturbing this moment.

 

 

* * *

Later, before sliding out of the _Supremacy_ to her… their home on Lirium, for a well-deserved sleep, Rey presses her fingers to the pad, lets it scan her retinas, and registers herself as Rey Amidala.

 

 

Billions of people are added to the official register every day. No one, outside of the people who registered them, and their friends and family, care much about any given new one.

She presses her fingers to the pad once more, as she registers again, as the wife of Ben Amidala.

And Kylo presses his fingers against it, too, registering himself as the husband of Rey Amidala.

So no one notices, or remarks, when Rey Amidala: Birthdate: 3/8/23 Years Before the Order, Parents: Unknown, Hair: Brown, Eyes: Brown, Skin: Light, Birth Place: Niima Station, Jakku, Husband: Ben Amidala, officially becomes a person in the electronic records of a galaxy wide system of head counting.

But they know, and for right now, that’s enough.


	23. Mission

4/8/1

 

It’s been more than eight months since Kylo first set foot on Lirium, but the green light of early morning still seems off to him. Probably because he was born on Chandrila, so his idea of morning involves golden-yellow light. Green, yellow, whatever, it makes the backs of his eyelids glow red, and wakes him up enough to enjoy being wrapped around Rey.

His _wife._ He feels that tingle through him.

He’s not sure if anything’s different, though it certainly feels good.

Thinking about it, he’s not sure if any of this has been a change per se, instead of him, and her, taking yet another step on the way to where they belong. The great DESTINY that Luke or Snoke would speak of. The mythical feeling of _knowing_ what comes next and where you’re supposed to go and all the rest of those words that so often felt like platitudes spoken by someone who already figured their life out. Though given how both Snoke and Luke ended, Kylo’s extremely doubtful that either of them knew much at all about their own personal destinies.

She makes a soft “Mmm?” sound. The sort of thing either of them will do when they’re not entirely sure if the other one is awake.

He kisses the back of her neck, and stretches, feeling soft and lazy. “The little boogers will miss you if you don’t get up soon, won’t they?”

She nods, and he feels her hair brushing his cheek. “C8 will go searching for you if you don’t ask for a cup of coffee in an hour or so…”

He sighs at that, wrapping his arms around her, kissing her shoulder. “What would be involved in us getting a day or three to just lay around in bed with each other?”

She laughs. “Crippling illness.”

“Let’s not do that.”

His arm is around her waist, hand nestled between her breasts. She strokes her fingers over it, down his arm, and makes a soft purring sound.

He kisses her ear, smelling her hair, feeling her body against his. Part of him, the part that’s usually up and interested in some touch first thing in the morning, is looking to move this out of sleepy snuggles into something more active. Another part, namely his brain, is actually thinking about how to get them a full day or two where they’ve got nothing to do but sleep, eat, and play with each other.

“If we were to just lay around… You’d want another adult here, right?”

She nods. “Chewie or Poe.”

“Finn and Rose are here all the time, right now,” Kylo says. And they are. They’ve gotten their cottage mostly set up, and the medical droid more or less working, and right now they’re all working on getting their med center set up. It’s slower than they’d like, but faster than it would be if it were just Rey working on it with the kids.

“And expecting a baby any day. They may be a bit busy soon.”

“So, Chewie or Poe, and Finn and Rose. At least one adult who can be paying full attention to the children.”

“Mm hm.” She rubs against him a bit, rocking her bum against him, encouraging the bit that’s poking her gently.

His hand shifts to her hips, stilling them. He’s appallingly bad of thinking about anything but sex when he’s having sex. “Shhh… Trying to think here.”

She takes his hand in hers, kissing his palm, and gently sucking his index finger, then leading it down her body to slip between her lips. “Later, your brain can work later.”

He groans against her neck, and surrenders to his body and hers.

Slick, wet glide, soft, languid friction, and sun dappled morning. He’s woken up to considerably worse in the past.

He’s kissing her neck and shoulder, sliding his finger over her again and again, finding that long, firm glide that lights her up. She’s rocking against him, teasing him, making him rise harder, fuller.

It’s just a little twist of her hips, and a little shift of position, and the teasing is over, and the low, dull itch of wanting slides into the glorious satisfaction of all over scratching.

There are many things that Kylo appreciates about his current life, and myriad aspects that he could have never guessed at. This is one of them.

Sex has flavors, or colors, or variety, or… whatever. He hadn’t been expecting that, at all. Previous to his time with Rey, sex came in exactly one flavor: desperation. He’d go as long as he possibly could, shutting his desire down until he just couldn’t anymore, and would then get off as hard and fast as he possibly could with whomever was available, to then ignore it again until he just couldn’t ignore it anymore.

The first few times they got together, he thinks of those as starvation sex. They were both so hungry for touch, for pleasure from someone who mattered, for another body to cherish your own. He knows that getting touched regularly after so long without certainly changed him. It changed her, too. Though, like many things with them, the change manifested in different ways. He’s finding it easier to keep himself emotionally less volatile. She’s becoming more comfortable letting people touch her, not just sexual or romantic touch, but little things like when Finn hugs her, or one of the children leans a head against her. She doesn’t immediately try to yank away when someone tries to make contact. She no longer automatically sees touch as a threat, and he’s becoming less threatening.

But neither of them are starving anymore. Right now… soft, easy, slow and lazy, appreciating the glow of morning with a person you adore, this is snack sex. He’s not staving off hunger, just having a bite because he likes the taste.

There’s spirit sex, like last night, where their bodies are certainly present, and a lot of the fun of it, but their minds lose their edges and they blur into each other. He knows his body enjoys it, but he’s fairly suspicious that it’s much more about what’s happening in his head than in his shaft.

There’s meal sex, which is most of the sex they have. Happy bodies enjoying each other. And maybe it’s not always _great,_ but it’s always _enough_. And for someone who’s been on starvation rations, knowing there’s a meal coming in the next day or two matters, _a lot._

Laying with her, calm and sated, having enjoyed their snack, he’s thinking that a day or three of just them and just this… together… would be… He’s not sure. A bit of all of it, probably… Banquet sex. Any want, any need, and time enough to explore and satisfy them all.

He _really_ likes that idea.

 

 

* * *

Later, in her shower, which does, these days, produce hot water on demand from the shower head, he’s rubbing soap against her.

“What would you need?” she asks.

“Mmm?” he replies, rubbing her shoulders and back. (Not necessarily doing a very good job washing her off, but enjoying touching her quite a bit.)

“To take a day or two off. I need someone to be here with the kids. And a good reason to leave. ‘Bye, Poe, have fun with the kiddos, I’m off to have a lot of sex,’ isn’t going to fly.”

He laughs out loud at that. “Maybe not, but it sounds good to me.”

She turns to face him, water rising off her back. Then up on her tiptoes to kiss him, followed by a _turn round_ gesture.

He does, and sits on the floor of the shower. It’s not anything he’s ever sought out, but he’s found he really, absolutely, ridiculously, _adores_ getting his hair washed. Three-quarters of him not having chopped it all off as it’s gotten longer is he loves having her wash it. He’s tall enough that she has a hard time doing it if he’s standing, so down he goes. Her shower is _just_ big enough for him to do it and not end up with his knees right under his chin. In his bath, he’s got plenty of room, so they usually do it there. (But for some reason his hair is a bit sweatier and messier than usual this morning and really needs a wash.)

 

 

He sighs, leaning his head against her hip, as she reaches for the shampoo. He hears the click of the bottle, and leans his head forward, so she can get everything easily. For a moment, he relaxes, feeling her fingers rubbing through his hair, making firm circles against his scalp, and he purrs.

Then he attempts to figure out what he’d need to do to be able to leave for a few days.

He did it before, when his mother died. He just _left._ But he’s got the sense that was what most people would refer to as a 'special circumstance.’ The war was, as much as it could be, over, and for a few days there just wasn’t all that much that they needed him for.

Right now it feels like as soon as he opens his door, and C8 brings in that cup of coffee, new people wanting something from him will come streaming in, as many as he’ll allow.

Allow being the operative word.

“I think I’d just have to tell C8 to clear my schedule. And keep the comm near so that if something major blew up I’d be able to get back.”

“Would we stay here, then?”

It occurs to him that’s a reasonable assumption. If they weren’t on the _Supremacy_ , then they’d be here, right?

That’s just… not what he was thinking about by ‘able to get back.’

“No?” He twists his head, looking up at her, water streaming down both of them, suds draining away across his shoulders and back.

“No?”

“People travel. For fun. I know it’s a thing people do.”

“Not a thing I’ve ever done.” She’s looking down at him, curious.

“Me, either. But… it’s a thing we could do.”

Curious is intensifying, and he can feel that this is very interesting to her, in a nebulous sort of way. “Where would we go?” she asks.

He’s completely out of his depths on that. It’s not like he’s got years of vacationing experience, or for that matter, is widely traveled in the sense of actually going to places instead of orbiting above them or visiting one, specific, area in a place, to do a job (break things, capture people, kill them, put the Fear of the First Order into the local populace: most of the places he’s been he either can’t or shouldn’t go back to), and then leave.

She can feel he’s literally clueless on that, so she tries another angle. “How would we get there? I don’t have a ship, and I’m thinking Chewie isn’t going to loan me the _Falcon_ for a day trip.”

Kylo chuckles at that. “Getting there isn’t a problem. I’ve got transportation.” Technically, he’s got an entire _fleet_ of transportation. Locating something that can get them from point A to point B shouldn’t be _that_ difficult. “Just have to figure out what to aim it at.”

 

 

* * *

C8 cannot be incredulous. It’s just not in his programming. But for someone who’s not capable of it, he’s got an awfully convincing impression of it. Part of his programming is an extremely complex learning algorithm, and sometimes Kylo wonders if C8 is just learning emotional responses from the people around him. Or at least learning to mimic them.

However it’s working, C8’s face is, as always, blank, but he’s developed this little head tilt that goes with when Kylo says something he wasn’t expecting.

“You want me to empty your personal account and transfer the credits into… currency?” C8 says.

“I just said that. Was something about that unclear?”

Again, C8 cannot be incredulous, but he’s definitely puzzled by this request. It’s clear he wants to say something like: _Have you developed a glitch in your programming?_ Instead, “The reason why you’d want to? Currency is… bulky and heavy and usually only good in the system you got it. Why would you want it?” comes out.

Kylo is actually aware of all of these things. He’s also aware that he can’t stare C8 into submission. “I just _do._ Can you arrange it?”

C8 thinks for a moment. “It will take some time. The entire store of ‘petty cash’ on the Supremacy is only 411,874 credits, and there’s 517,987 in your account.”

He’ll admit that’s not an obstacle he was expecting. He knows he gets paid. He didn’t think his salary was much beyond the average officer’s. He’s having a difficult time wrapping his head around the idea that he’s got more money in his account than the _Supremacy_ keeps on hand. Then it occurs to him, it’s not the amount. It’s that he wants actual currency, which apparently, the _Supremacy_ rarely uses. Getting physical money into hand is the issue, not how much he’s been paid. “How much petty cash do we go through in a month here?”

“About 250,000 credits.”

“Then leave that, and set an order to go find more currency for me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who am I seeing today?”

“This morning, the generals keeping up the border with the Unknown Region want to meet and talk about setting up shipping lanes instead of ship registrations.” Kylo remembers reading the report on that. They’ve fired on ships that had been properly registered because it took too long to get confirmation they had been registered, and they’ve let others through because they’d faked registrations. If everyone who had legitimate business went through a few lanes, that would speed things up and make it easier to tell smugglers from legitimate business.

“You’ve got Major Frakes this afternoon.” He knows that means his formalwear is close to done, and supposedly needs to be fitted again. He’s uncertain why it needs to be fitted multiple times. His casual clothing didn’t, but everything Frakes has made for him has fit well and been quite comfortable, so he’s not going to begrudge him the twenty or so minutes it’ll take to handle this.

“After Major Frakes, you’ve got Admiral Schiff, and a meeting about the state of the fleet.” Kylo nods at that, too. That’s a standing one. Every month they talk about how his ships are doing, where, and what’s hit the point where it basically can’t be fixed again and needs to be scrapped and replaced. Every month that one makes his teeth grit. So many of their ships are floating wrecks. If Snoke had put half as much into the fleet as he did Starkiller… Apparently that was his great gamble. If he could build the biggest, baddest weapon around, it didn’t matter if he let the rest of the fleet get threadbare.

Kylo supposes it worked, to a degree. In less than a week, Snoke took out the Republic, and what was left of the Resistance, handing Kylo victory, but setting him up to try and hold that victory with fewer than half of his men, no Starkiller, the Supremacy literally holding together by will power and steeltape, and every other ship in his fleet months, if not years, behind on maintenance.

So, far, he’s been lucky, or blessed, enough that no one’s been willing to try to tangle with him. He knows his citykillers are more than set to go up against a planet, or a star cruiser class or larger ship. If more than 200 people fit onto it, he’s ready to blow it from the sky.

Small though… His fighters are… woefully understaffed. Snoke had more than a million of them, fully crewed, spread across the galaxy. He’s got 600,000 fighters, 500,000 that are fully crewed, and only 300,000 of them are in good shape. His own star destroyer and larger classed ships are… ranging from falling apart to serviceable, depending on how much action they’d seen, and how many resources they’ve been able to scavenge.

And since he’s not raping every planet that falls under his sights, the money and materials needed to fix everything is coming in more slowly than his men would like. Everything is _better_ than it was the day he took over, for example he’s got the Supremacy back into better condition than it was before Starkiller fell, but the Order is not as better as it would be if Hux were in charge.

He knows Schiff will again suggest that there are a large number of mining colonies they could just _take_ , and if they were to do that, within a year, he’d be back to full strength.

Kylo figures that he’s got about three more meetings with Schiff before he mutinies, likely taking most of his flight command with him, and goes after those colonies on his own, trying to get the materials to get his ships fixed. He’s honestly not sure what to do with that. He wants that kind of man in charge of his fleet. That level of dedication makes Schiff very good at what he does. And that level of dedication to the fleet means that Schiff has real support. This isn’t the sort of thing Kylo can take care of by just spattering Schiff’s entrails about his office. If he does that, Schiff’s second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on, in command, will eventually lead his own ships against him.

That said, he doesn’t want to go back to using the First Order’s playbook. 

“C8, every time Schiff and I meet, he gives me a list of mining colonies.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go over the list, and find me the five of them most willing to join the Order.”

“Join how?” C8 asks.

He’s not exactly liking this, but they all keep suggesting things like this matter and would help. “The ones that belong to people who might want a formal alliance with us. Who’d be willing to fob off a colony or two for one. Or the colonies most willing to ally with us if we give them better terms working for us than their parent planet.”

“I will do that, sir.”

Kylo rubs his forehead. “C8, do we have diplomats?”

“No sir.”

“Of course not.” Neither Snoke nor Hux ever saw any need for a bargaining chip beyond, _Do what I say or die._

Kylo takes one last sip of his coffee. The cup’s empty. Time for his day to begin, for real.    

 

 

* * *

When he meets with Frakes, Kylo’s in a fairly decent mood. Setting a good price for access to the ‘free trade’ lanes in what’s going to be the border to the Unknown Region, and changing their policy from _shoot on sight_ to _disable, capture, use or sell_ anything attempting to cross the border without permission should bump his coffers up a bit.

Not quite as lucrative as just grabbing entire planets’ worth of stuff, but it’ll help.

He can feel Frakes before he enters his office. The door is shut, and Frakes is afraid of what might be behind it.

C8 opens it, and Frakes does his best not to sigh out loud when he sees Kylo sitting at his desk, by himself, no ‘disturbing imagery’ about.

“Jon,” Kylo gestures to one of the seats at his desk, and sees that Jon has a soft cloth bag filled with what he assumes is formalwear.

Given that he’s supposed to be trying this on, Kylo realizes sitting around his desk probably isn’t the right plan, so he stands, and then opens the door to his personal room.

“My Lord,” Jon nods, and follows him.

Once inside his room, Kylo says, “You can call me Kylo.”

Frakes looks at him, purses his lips, eyes wary, and says, “I’m not sure that I can, sir.”

Kylo can feel that truly is honest. The idea that Kylo has a first name, let alone that he’d about allowed to use it, is boggling to Frakes. “Master Ren or sir, then.” My Lord, is what he called Snoke, and he doesn’t exactly enjoy hearing it aimed back at him. Especially not out of the mouth of anyone he respects.

Frakes nods at that.

“Do you prefer Major Frakes?”

“Whatever you like, My—Master Ren.”

He supposes this is to be expected. The last person he dealt with here who felt comfortable calling him Kylo was…no one. That never happened. His knights called him Ren. Phasma called him Ren. Hux would call him Ren or go out of his way to avoid using his title. Mostly because Hux refused to admit that Kylo was the Supreme Leader of anything, let alone _him._

“What do you have for me, Jon?” Maybe if he uses his first name enough, he’ll eventually start to feel like he can do it, too.

That gets a satisfied, if slightly nervous, look out of Frakes. Kylo can feel he’s proud of what he’s made, that it’s _good,_ and afraid that Kylo won’t like it anyway.

He lays the bag out on Kylo’s bed, and opens it, showing off what’s inside. “Two outfits. One’s full on, affairs-of-state, _FORMAL,_ the other one is the step between your command blacks and that.” He lays the pieces out into two separate outfits.

“Semi-formal. Black trousers. You’ll note these are just plain, black ebanthal wool. Warm, very soft, people who know fabric, and that’ll be most of them at a lot of these things, will know this is _expensive_ and rare.

“Shirt, gray sand-washed silk, v collar, pinned cuffs.” Kylo’s not entirely sure what those things mean, other than the shirt is very soft looking, with an almost velvety texture, and that there are little holes in the cuffs that he assumes the ‘pins’ go through. It’s shaped quite a bit like his usual shirts, aside from the pinholes and lack of texture on the sleeves. “Cuff links.” He shows off a set of small disks, they’re some sort of silvery metal with the Order’s symbol embossed on them, and set in black lacquer.

“Band collared black jacket, also ebanthal wool.” This one looks a lot like a combination of his tunic and shirt. The shape is about the same. Thigh length, collar that comes together just below his laryngeal prominence. The sleeves are part of it, and embroidered in silver silk on the left arm is his personal symbol. There’s a thin bland of black embroidery at the collar and cuffs, black on black, with the embroidery just a bit shinier than the black of the wool.

“It goes with this belt, worn at the waist, outside the jacket.” And again, this is similar to his command blacks. It’s not quite as wide, the leather is glossy, and the hook for his lightsaber is gleaming lacquered black. “And these gloves.” Again, similar to his command blacks, just shinier and more expensive.

“Cloak. More of the ebanthal wool. The lining is the same silk as your shirt.”

Kylo nods. He’s fine with more visible gray in his outfit.

“With this one, you wear your hair up or down. If it’s up, a black tie, like you’re using today, will work just fine.”

Kylo nods, looking at it. It’s his command uniform made of more expensive material with a bit more gray, and some expensive details, like the thread and cuff links. _Shinier and more expensive, indeed._

Kylo nods at it. “You appear to have grasped my aesthetic.”

Frakes smiles, pleased at that. “Okay, onto the _formal wear_. Same basic trouser, with a silver satin stripe down the leg.” That’s a little flashier than Kylo would normally go, but he also wouldn’t normally attend something requiring an outfit like this, so he figures it makes sense for this to be outside his normal boundaries.

“The shirt, black silk, high band collar and pinned cuffs.” This is more what he thinks of as silk. It’s got a bit of sheen to it, while looking decadently smooth to the touch, and unlike the v neck, which just pulled over his head, this one opens in the front. Like many of his tunics, it appears to close with a line of hooks and eyes.

Jon touches an expanse of steel gray silk with a thin silver pinstripe. “Vest. This goes over the shirt and under the jacket.”

Kylo’s seen vests before. His father was fond of them. He liked the fact that they were an easy way to stick extra pockets into an outfit. But this is nothing like the vests he wore. This is _fancy_. The silk almost shines in the cold light of his room, and the silver pinstripe does. The buttons are black, and there’s black silk banding around the edges.  

“Why?” Kylo understands why you wear a shirt under your jacket, warmth and ease of cleaning. He doesn’t understand why you’d put a vest on top of that, unless it’s some sort of armor, or like his father’s, you use it for extra storage, but as best he can tell this is just silk.

“You’ll see when you put the jacket on. For now, just trust me on it.” Jon touches the jacket, which is when Kylo begins to get an inkling of why you’d wear a vest under it. Unlike the rest of his tunics/jackets, this one doesn’t come together in a band collar. He doesn’t think it fastens at all. He’s not seeing any buttons or hooks and eyes. “Wool silk blend, silk lapel, silver detailing.” Like the trousers, the silver embroidery framing the lapel and on the cuffs is flashier than Kylo would normally go, but not painfully so, and he’s intrigued by the silk of the lapel against the wool silk of the body of the jacket. They’re both black, but the different textures add something to the look.   

“No cloak for this. Don’t want anything to take away from the line of the lapel or the detailing on the jacket.”

Kylo can see that. There’s got to be a full day, if not more, of embroidery on the jacket, so you wouldn’t cover that with a cloak.

Jon gently touches the embroidery. It’s a thick line of silvery-gray thread whirling into a complex knot of sharp twists and turns. Through it twines a thin silver-white line of looping swoops. “I wasn’t sure how you’d like something like this to look.”

Kylo’s also not sure how he’d like something like that to look, too. But he’s not put off by what’s in front of him. “It’s fine.”

Jon nods and moves onto the next bit of the outfit. “Cuff links.” Just two silver bars, about as wide across as his thumb. “Last piece,” Jon’s holding it out on his hand to Kylo. It’s a… he’s honestly not sure. It’s a band of silver, about as long as Rey’s pinkie finger and twice as wide, with some sort of clasp under it. “For your hair.” Frakes pantomimes using it to clips his hair back. “If you’re wearing it back, you’ll use this to hold it in place.”

“No mark of the Order?” At least, Kylo’s not seeing one.

“If you’re wearing this, no one is going to be mistaking you for anyone else. This is for when you’re hosting or attending as a guest of honor.”

Kylo can feel that Frakes is trying to tell him something, and he’s not getting it.

Frakes swallows, looking at each outfit, thinking, feeling somewhat nervous.

“Jon, I’m not going to get angry at you for telling me something I need to know, and” he gestures to the clothing, “this is the sort of thing I know almost nothing about.”

Frakes takes another breath, and says, “Okay. This one,” he points to the semi-formal clothing. “This is for the sort of thing where you’re representing the Order.” He’s still thinking… “Let’s take a step further back… Uh… Do you know the difference between a palace and a castle?”

Actually, he doesn’t. Until thirty seconds ago, he thought they were synonyms. In fact, outside of books, he’s never even run into either, and on top of that, he’s not sure what that might have to do with clothing. “No.”

“Okay…” Frakes nibbles his upper lip. “It’s about how you display your power. A castle is a place where the ruler lives, works, _rules,_ but it’s fortified. It’s protected by walls studded with guns, armies shelter there, ready to attack, weapons are its defining feature. It projects power by accumulating weapons and strength in one place, and making sure that anyone who comes near knows an attack would be suicide.” He touches the belt, and the hook for Kylo’s lightsaber. “The Supremacy is a castle, and this is an outfit for a warrior king. For the man who displays his power as a visible threat. It may be subtle, the way you walk around with just the saber and no guards, telling everyone who gets close enough to notice that you know you’re the most dangerous man in any room, but it’s there.”

Kylo’s following that well enough, and figures that fits.

“A palace is also a place where the ruler lives, works, _rules._ But it’s not fortified. There may be guards, but there are no walls, no large weapons systems, at least, not visible ones. It’s the symbol of a ruler who projects his power by letting everyone know that he knows that by attacking him, they’ll damage themselves.

“It’s the mark of a man who knows his power benefits everyone around him. The man who knows that what he offers is more valuable than what anyone could get by taking him out. The man who knows he’s the key feature of an indispensable system.” Kylo can feel that’s where Jon wants the Order to go. That’s his hope for a system of laws. Part of his reason for joining up in the first place.

Jon touches the semi-formal outfit. “This is now. You don’t need to try this on. I know it fits. You know it fits. It’ll feel like another skin, and you’ll wear it without a thought.”

He looks to the formal one. “This is the future.” He looks at it again, stroking the silk of the vest. “Honestly, you haven’t earned this, yet. You haven’t built your palace. And there’s no mark on it because… This’ll sound stupid, but… You haven’t put your mark on the Order, yet. You’ve taken it away from Snoke, but it’s not yours, not yet. You’ll get there, but… not yet.”

Jon looks at him, blue eyes bright and eager. “One day, you will _be_ the Order. You won’t represent it, which is what you’re doing now, you’ll _be it._ People won’t have a line in their mind between the two of them. You won’t be the Master of The Order, you’ll be _The Order_ , the embodiment of all the good the Order does, and when that’s true, this is what you wear to show that off.”

Jon pauses again, a breath of uncertainty and fear, and then squashes it down and commits to it, “When you’re ready for this, you will be ‘My Lord.’ Master… that’s what, a teacher? Sir? The greenest ensign on his first day answers to that. Hell, they call me _sir._ This is the outfit of an Emperor, secure in his Empire, and you’ll wear it to things where you wish to convey that.”

Kylo nods, thinking, _liking_ this idea, and then says, “Thank you.”

Jon nods, too. “I’d like you to try this one on, though. I’m not sure about the silver piping or the silver pinstripe. We might want to go just gray, or pewter. I want to see it on you, get a feel if it’s too flashy.”

“Okay.”

Kylo feels a little odd stripping down to his underwear to try the outfit on, but… Jon measured him for it in the first place, he’s placed his hands all over his body, and he’s already in his own room, so…

Jon looks away while he strips down to his underwear and socks, which Kylo appreciates, though he feels silly for appreciating it. He routinely trains in only a pair of trousers and his gloves, but for some reason he’s feeling significantly more naked right now than he does when he’s doing that.

That idea spurs another one, so as he’s pulling on the new trousers (very soft, a bit tighter than he normally wears them, but not uncomfortable) he says, “Speaking of warrior kings. My command blacks, besides the gloves, have no armor, and the gloves only give me a few seconds of heat protection against my saber.”

“Do you want a suit of armor?”

“I don’t think my fighting style would mesh with Storm Trooper style armor, but some sort of armored blacks would be of value. I haven’t been in a real fight in quite a while, but I’m sure it will happen again, and these days, it’s important that I return from the fight.”

Jon nods, looking at Kylo now, seeing the body under the clothing, and the disk against his chest. There’s a flicker of recognition, and Kylo can feel him thinking that whatever it is he’s wearing on the necklace, that’s the direction he needs to go to put _his_ mark on the Order.

“Let me know the next time you train, sir, and I’ll watch. By the time you’re done, I’ll have a good idea of what your armor should look like so it can move with you.”

“Thank you.” He pulls on the vest, slipping it over the shirt. “I like this.” He feels odd liking it, but he does. Snoke would accuse him of being his father’s son when he was mad at him, but… Well, he _is._

Jon glows at that. Then he thinks of something else. “How is the off-duty wear working for you?”

“Quite well.” Kylo says with a little smile, remembering Rey liking it.

Jon glows brighter at that.

“Is the jacket too small?” Kylo asks when he finds that it doesn’t actually close.

“No, it’s supposed to do that.”

Kylo feels like he should be done, but he’s noticing there’s a belt and two little bottles on his bed. He pulls the belt to him, and then stares at it. If the jacket doesn’t close, he’s not sure where to put it. “Uh…”

“Through the little loops at the waist of the trousers.”

“Under the jacket?”

Frakes nods.

He can do that, though it takes him a moment to figure out how to feed the belt through the clasp, and then the metal tongue through the hole in the belt, and then shoving the leather back through the clasp to fasten it. (A ridiculous design if you ask him. All of his other belts have a latch, press side A into side B, and they fasten together.) It feels odd to have a belt just hiding under most of his clothing. Doesn’t seem to be much point of it if you can’t see it, or hang a weapon from it.   

But maybe that’s the point of it, there’s no weapon hanging off of it. It’s just sitting there, kind of useless and expensive. It’s got to be expensive, it’s good leather. He can tell that just by the feel of it.

“Do I want to know how much this costs?”

“Maybe.” Jon shrugs. “Probably much less than you’d expect. For an average person, this is a few months of income. For you… Many of the people who make these fabrics will donate several meters of them in multiple patterns, just to have them seen on you. That takes the cost down considerably.”

“Oh.”

“I paid for the wool, because I needed a lot of it for the trousers, cloak, and jacket. The rest of it… I just had to say who it was for, and it, and several other versions showed up, gratis, on the hope I’d use them for you.”

“People will give you things, on the off chance I may wear them?”

“Yes, sir. If you do, it’s good advertising for them. If you were anything approaching a common size, they’d be sending pre-made outfits. As is,” he looks up and down Kylo, “I’m not putting you in anything off the rack. It won’t fit right, and no one’s better off with you looking shoddily dressed.”

Kylo’s got no idea what to do with that.

Frakes is looking him over, eyes critical… “I’m still not sure about the silver.” He’s looking up and down Kylo, making him feel naked in a way he’s never been. Dissected, but not threatened. It’s a unique sensation, and Kylo’s not sure he likes it. “Maybe pewter… Maybe black satin…” He’s slowly walking around Kylo, occasionally touching the clothing on him. “The shirt’s good… Trousers hang right… You need different underwear for this… briefs, not shorts… Vest… maybe black, silver trim, silver buttons…” He nods again… “Black satin trim on the jacket and trousers. Just hints of light, not too much of it.” He chews his bottom lip. “Black satin… It’ll reflect light the way silver does, but only when the light hits it right… Yeah…” Then he stops roaming around Kylo. “This is close. It’s not quite there yet.”

Kylo thinks of the token on his chest. “I’d like it if you kept some gray in it. Maybe not the silver, but… definitely gray.” 

Frakes thinks about that, circling Kylo again.

“What are the two little bottles?” Kylo asks. Obviously, he’s dressed enough that Frakes is circling him, watching carefully, so whatever they are, they aren’t part of the outfit. But he brought them, so… maybe they are?

“Cologne. I’ve noticed you don’t wear it, and wasn’t sure if that’s personal preference or just something you weren’t aware men who wear the kind of outfit I’m fitting you for tend to wear.”

“The latter.” Cologne and perfume are things Kylo knows exists, but doesn’t come into contact with on any regular basis. Though, as he’s thinking, he remembers Rey in the scented blue bath, and that unknown floral wafts through his senses and his body responds, lengthening, which is when he realizes, comments about taping it down notwithstanding, he normally has on a tunic that comes to his mid-thigh which is more than heavy enough to keep any exuberances his body may wish to display pointing discretely down, and his current outfit consists of trousers snug enough Frakes wants him wearing different undergarments, and an open jacket made of a much lighter cut of fabric.

He shifts out of that mindset, fast, banishing the image and scent of Rey. He catches the tail end of Jon saying, “…on your wrist, and then rub it on your throat.”

Kylo nods.

Jon’s still circling him. “Do you own shoes? Not boots, but actual shoes?”

Kylo shakes his head. 

“These trousers go with shoes. They don’t get tucked into boots.”

Kylo supposes that’s probably why they don’t narrow below his knee.

“We’ve got your boot size on file. I’ll make sure to get some shoes with these.”

“Thank you.” Kylo does something he hasn’t, not yet, and walks across his room to his mirror. Staring at himself, seeing the first draft of an image Frakes is trying to bring to life, Kylo _gets_ it. He can feel another piece of where he’s taking the Order shift into place.

 

 

He has power, in the sense, as Hux so crudely put it, of having the biggest damn shaft in the galaxy. Hux got off on beating people with it. But… stretching the metaphor to the breaking point if not slightly beyond, the point of _getting hard_ is to _create_ something, not smack someone in the face with it.

Creation is _supposed_ to feel good. He was literally designed through a billion generations of evolution to _create_ things. Specifically more humans, but… he’s feeling washed in a flow of both the physical and metaphysical all blending together into a somewhat jumbled, but clarifying sense of _where_ this is supposed to go.

“Jon…” He rubs his lips together, feeling like he’s standing on the edge of something, about to get closer to it. “I normally take my lunch alone, but… would you be willing to take a few days, think more about castles and palaces, and then have lunch with me, and just, talk, about how you think this works?”

Jon looks startled at that idea. He’s still staring at the suit, debating maybe making the silver accents just a bit thinner, or maybe damping down the sheen, or… Once he realizes what he’s been invited to do, a flush of pleasure bursts through him, and he blushes slightly.

“Yes, sir. I’d be honored.”

 

 

* * *

He runs later than expected with Frakes, but Kylo’s satisfied with how that worked out.

Later than expected means Schiff, who is already expecting yet another meeting that doesn’t get him what he wants, is grinding his teeth to nubs.

Kylo feels the wave of frustration off of him well before C8 escorts him into his office.

Before Schiff can say anything else, Kylo says to him, “Five. Pick the five colonies you could do the most with.”

“You’re giving me permission to take them?” Schiff is so pleased at the idea Kylo’s almost loathe to squash it.

“No. And I will not be doing that, either. I’m having a list drawn up of the five I’ve got the best shot of coming to a diplomatic accord. If there’s any overlap between your list and that one, those will be the first ones I move on.”

Kylo can feel this spark Schiff’s interest. “Diplomatic accord, how?” He’s eager, but wary. Like he’s afraid to put too much hope into this idea, but it’s still there, a tiny spark, begging for fuel.

“We have things of value to offer in exchange for materials.”

And that apparently killed it. “Sir,” Schiff’s eyes have narrowed, and he’s speaking like Kylo is especially dense, “if we could _pay_ for this, I would have already done so. I understand you wish to… distance yourself from Supreme Leader Snoke, and in most cases, I approve of it, too, but we _cannot_ get what we need, in the quantities and speed we need it, if we keep playing nicely.”

Kylo nods. Again, that puts Schiff off balance, that tiny spark flares. It’s the first time he’s granted Schiff his point, and that seems to be helping to get him to listen to what he’s going to say next. “While I should have more credits to direct your way, soon, that was not the value I was thinking. Our fleet is not in the best shape ever, but it is still bigger and more imposing than anything else in the sky. We can offer _security._ There has to be someone who values that, and if not, then we can use that fleet and our troops to offer the people on the ground enough _security_ to have a minor or major insurrection and come over to the Order if they so desired.”

Schiff thinks about that. For a good long minute he’s silent, turning the opportunities over in his mind. Kylo feels it when the spark flares into a flame. A tiny flame, but a flame nonetheless.  “It’ll be your recruiting stations, big scale.”

“I hope we can take them without having to—“

Schiff shakes his head. “No. The ones that produce enough to be worth it for us, produce enough that it’s worth it for their home worlds to protect them. They’re state-of-the-art facilities, colonies their home worlds spent money and time setting up. They aren’t going to give them up for protection.”

“Then we’ll start with the smaller ones.” Kylo smirks. If he learned anything from his parents, this is it. “Setting up a functional insurrection takes time. We might as well see what we can get by offering security to the small ones, and seed insurrections on the big ones.”

Schiff smiles at that. This is better news than he was expecting.

“That said, how are we doing?”

Schiff gives him a tired look. “Better than I’d expected, not as well as I wished. We’re within 80% of our target for flight crews.” Kylo knows that Schiff set those targets low, not expecting to be able to find what he needed. Pilots, mechanics, flight engineers are worth more than double their weight in gold right now. Not only did Snoke destroy the Hosnian system, which held the capitol of the Republic, it also held three of the four largest deep space/hyperspeed flight training programs in the galaxy. (That’s part of why the capitol was there. They moved it to stick it near most of the high density military training programs. The theory being they’d need to defend their training programs, so might as well stick the capitol there, too, and not dilute their forces. That was before anyone knew Starkiller was a possibility.) Kylo controls the fourth, but even he doesn’t have the capacity to make sure he’s got enough pilots. _Everyone_ is hurting for pilots right now.

Kylo listens to Schiff’s report, making the occasional note for himself, and nodding along. At the end of it, as Schiff is about to leave, something he said to Rey about transportation springs to mind. “If I wanted a small ship, with hyperspeed, no Order markings, able to comfortably transport two people, can you get me one?”

Schiff grins widely at that, figuring a ship like that, actually several of them, is step one in Mission: Foster Insurrection. 

“Give me a week. How many do you want?”

Kylo, able to feel what Schiff thinks he’s doing says, “Start with the one. I’m sure if we need to, we can expand from there.”

 

 

* * *

The fact of the matter is, The Master of the Order does not need money. Not on the scale that’s being presented here.

His treasury people are extremely interested in why the man who can have whatever he wishes, just by naming it, would want three boxes containing… of all things… hard currency. When they got the message from C8, they actually double checked to make sure it wasn’t a joke or something.

It took some time and effort to hunt down currency. The records say they have it, but… _Locating_ it is a different story. It takes more than a week to just track it all down.

Who even uses currency? They have literally trillions of credits in their hands, but…

If the Master wishes the equivalent of a mere two hundred and eleven thousand credits in assorted currencies (as much as they could safely muster without going into the petty cash they actually need)… Then the Master gets (eventually) three boxes filled with various circles and triangles and squares, and bits and bobs of a multitude of precious and semi-precious metals and papers.

Maybe he’s running a secret mission of some sort? Very secret. And that, combined with his request for a non-Order marked transport capable of hyperspeed, and his sudden interest in new clothing, gets even more gossip started.

This is the first of the rumors to come to Kylo personally. General Ritter, his commander in charge of a third of his inner rim territory, pulls him aside and says, quietly… “Master Ren, I… Don’t wish to intrude in that which I’m not supposed to know, but… there is conversation… suggesting you are thinking of a mission, and… I’d like you to know that if you ever need an extra set of hands, mine are at your disposal. It’s been a few years, but once upon a time, I was very good at things like this.”

Since Kylo does not, in fact, have any such mission, because he was not, on any level, thinking of personally visiting any colony in an effort to rally support for the Order, this very discrete and polite inquiry throws him for a loop. If he’d been wearing his mask, General Ritter would have never caught the look on his face, but because his face is naked, and because he’s got nothing, at all, percolating along those lines, he sees the confusion.

“You don’t have a mission in the works,” Ritter says, looking like he’s about to die of embarrassment.

“What conversation?” Kylo asks.

Ritter swallows, hard, because now he’s got to open up about how closely they all watch him, and the level of talking they do. “Master Ren…” He inhales, fast, wincing. “It hasn’t escaped our notice that you appear to be gearing up to… infiltrate something, perhaps. The clothing, the currency, the blaster, the ship…”

Kylo’s face is a mask of perfect stone, now.

“I’m sorry, Master.”

Kylo nods. “Perhaps more time managing your own affairs, and less on mine, would be warranted?”

“Yes, Master Ren.”

As Ritter is trying to vanish, and is working his way out of Kylo’s office, Kylo can feel that he’s got a whole new level of gossip about to start spewing, namely, if there isn’t a mission, what the hell is the Master about to do? Run away? Not a lot of currency for that, but unlike credits, it is untraceable and…

Kylo sighs. “Vacation. I’m planning on taking a few days and _not_ being the Master of the Order.”

That startles Ritter to the point of stopping him, and his thoughts, dead in his tracks. “Oh. Yes, sir. That’s…” deeply surprising to him. The idea that Master Ren may do things like relax is utterly foreign. Snoke never, as best as he knew, took a day off. But… many of the rest of the officers do, at least on occasion. Especially now that they aren’t actively fighting a war. “May I ask where you’re planning on going?”

Kylo still doesn’t know. “No, but you’re welcome to offer suggestions if there’s a place you think is particularly nice.”

Ritter shrugs. “Nice for what? Do you want a city, or beach, or space port, or… what do you like to do?” And, again, it’s clear that the idea that Kylo might _like to do_ things is also utterly alien to Ritter.

Kylo doesn’t say, _that’s part of what I’m attempting to find out._ “Some place big enough I can just blend in.”

Ritter nods. “The clothing. That’ll go a long way. There’s nothing like taking the uniform off at the end of the day. My wife says I’m a different person when I’m wearing it.”

That’s more than Kylo ever guessed about Ritter, or the nature of uniforms. 

He’s thinking about where to go to blend in. “Imperial city. More than a trillion people there. What’s one more? No one will notice an extra ship.”

Kylo nods. “Coruscant.” It doesn’t feel right, but it’s certainly possible. He nods again. “Would you want to go on a mission that involved going under cover?”

“Very much, sir.”

“Noted. There may be one in the near future.” Much to Kylo’s displeasure, “diplomatic” channels are _much_ slower than military ones. C8’s still trying to set up meetings with half of the systems he’s interested in.

“Thank you, sir.” And Ritter leaves him, looking quite pleased.

 


	24. Palaces

4/22/1

 

“If I wanted to leave for two or three days, could you cover me here?” Rey asks Poe.

He looks away from the fuel conduit they’re trying to get fixed on his ship. The damn thing is just _not_ doing the job right. It’s supposed to be able to move 25cc of fuel per second, and if it gets more than 23 he’d be shocked. But, as of yet, he can’t find any blocks or narrowing in it.

“Yes, but on the condition that you tell me _why_ you want to leave. You and Padme looking for a tryst?”

That’s actually exactly what they’re planning on doing, but it isn’t exactly what she wants to tell Poe. Her blush, on the other hand, apparently speaks louder than any words she was hoping to say.

He smirks, wide and brilliant, and she can feel he’s genuinely pleased for her. “About time. You know people take time off, right? Not everyone works every single day of their lives.”

“Where I come from, if you don’t work you don’t eat.”

“Well, you’re not there, now. Go, I’ll watch the sprogs for a few days. Bring me back some juicy stories.”

Rey rolls her eyes and hands him a roll of steel tape. There are some smears of fuel along a few of the joints, so it might be leaking a bit. A little tape’ll help with that. “You never tell me juicy stories from when you go away.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve had one to share. Your break should be more interesting than: I got drunk, went dancing, got tuffed, went home, took a shower, slept it off, and did it again when I sobered up,” he says as he pulls a length of tape off the roll and wraps it around the conduit. “This isn’t going to hold long term. I do need to get away long enough to get a replacement for it.”

“ _That’s_ what you do when you’re not here?” Rey’s not sure if she’s horrified or feels sorry for him.

“Well, not all of the time.” He looks a little sheepish, and she can feel the first bit was supposed to be a joke that got out of hand and leaked truth all over the place.

She puts the conduit schematics down and wraps an arm around him. “You’re so lonely, aren’t you?”

He sighs. “Always was.” And he smiles, a little, “Maybe always will be. Having something to do,” he gently knocks on the board the conduits are welded to, “helps.”

She’s a little uncomfortable saying it, because he’s never admitted it, but, she’s been able to feel it since Finn and Rose’s wedding, so… “You know you could bring a… friend… or lover… here. The Empire’s been gone for a long time, and… I wouldn’t enforce their rules.” She figures that’s the safest way to say that she knows he likes boys, and that she’s okay with it.

He smirks at that, too, though this time it’s neither wide nor bright. “Leia told me that, too. Alderaan was always relaxed about things like that. Holdo and I apparently had only two things in common, and the Resistance was the other one.” He sighs. “Turns out the Empire had an easy time enforcing that law over most of the galaxy. Apparently, it’s really common to believe the only right way to have sex is whatever way you personally happen to like to have it, and everyone else is a deviant in need of prison or death. A lot of us find it just easier to keep things like this quiet.”

“Okay.” She’s not going to push. “But if you ever don’t want to…”

He shoots her a bit of side-eye. “How about this, I’ll bring one of my boys’ round for dinner about the time you and Padme host one?”

She nods. He’s got her on that.

“So, where are you going? When?”

As of this morning, Kylo’s been able to secure three days at the end of the month where he’s got nothing on his schedule. Where is still the question. “End of the month, and we’re not sure where, yet.”

“What’s your budget, and what do you want to do,” Poe’s eyes are mischievous, “besides each other?”

Rey shifts that arm around him to a headlock, and he laughs.

“There are good places for that, too, you know?” Again, he’s joking, but there’s some truth leaking out, because that’s not the sort of thing she knows and he figures she might want to.

“What’s Naboo like?” She kind of likes the idea of learning more about Amidala, and that would likely be easier on her home planet.

“I’ve only been there twice, and the human settlements, both times. The lake district is pretty. Lots of nature, rolling hills, waterfalls and lakes. Really, not all that much different than here, other than you can rent a cabin, and you’re a short hop on a speeder to a town. Or you can find a little town on a lake. Theed… the capitol, I was there once. It’s nice. Stuffy, big on proper dress and behavior, but pretty and the food is good.

“You could do a lot worse on a vacation.”

That sounds good to Rey.

 

 

* * *

A year ago, Kylo Ren could not have envisioned this moment, though, with each passing month, it’s becoming a more and more regular event.

A year ago, after he’d worked himself to tired, he’d eat, meditate, and then go to bed, assuming he could sleep. If not, he’d sit comfortably, meditate more, pulling up as many as his dark memories as he needed to keep himself going.

It’s been months since he’s done that.

He still meditates on nights when sleep won’t come to him, though those nights are becoming fewer and further apart, and his meditations are becoming less and less useful to him, because he hasn’t yet found a new pattern to focus himself. His past is dead, and his present hasn’t yet found the route to the future, not on that front, anyway.

What has replaced that pattern, often, is eating with Rey, talking about what they’ve been doing, sex, and then slipping from the _Supremacy_ to Lirium. Quiet time. Sometimes they just go straight to sleep. A lot of times, neither of them is sleepy yet, so they read.

He’s always got more reports to go through, more information to handle, more people to order around. And tonight’s another night where, sated and comfortable, but not tired, they’re in her bed, with their respective datapads, reading away.

He’s reclined, back against the headboard, legs stretched out across their bed, hacking his way through the nuts and bolts of a report on his manpower levels, and how his plan to get his longer-serving members out is biting him, massively, in the ass because apparently it takes _years_ to get people like master sergeants, good mechanics, and competent mid-grade logistical officers trained properly.  

She’s laying on her back, head pillowed on his thigh, reading hers. Right now, she’s cramming everything she can find about microfarms into her head. It’d be nice if they weren’t relying solely on imports and the lake for food, and… Well, 211,000 credits coming her way as soon as she wants them, so… Time to find something to do with them.

 

 

They’ve been at it for an hour when Kylo puts his pad down. There’s only so long he can read reports like this without feeling like he wants to go kill people. He lays his head against the wall, and closes his eyes. He breathes deeply, easily, trying to quell the desire to just destroy it all, though right now, his mental images of burning the whole thing down are quite satisfying.

She squeezes his knee, rolls to her side, and kisses his thigh. “Frustrated?”

His teeth grit. He doesn’t have to say yes, she can feel it pouring off of him.

“Skills vacuum. I pull Snoke and Palpatine’s men out. That lets me put more of my mark on things, and cuts down on the number of people I need to kill because they’re plotting against me or behaving inappropriately, but now I’m getting low on things like mechanics, pilots, and master sergeants.” He rubs his eyes. “Apparently, it takes five years to train a combat pilot if you don’t start with someone Force sensitive.”

Luke didn’t train him how to fly. Han didn’t, either. Under Snoke, he picked it up in less than a year with what he thought was a large amount of practice and effort, but he’s now realizing that was a scandalously small amount of time. Apparently, how he did it, _wasn’t_ common.

“Mechanics, good ones, take longer.” He strokes her hair. Apparently just being able to pick up a piece of whatever it is and just _know_ how it works also _isn’t_ common.

“A third of my logistics officers thought retirement sounded good. Which is great in the sense that they aren’t just _taking_ whatever they need whenever they need it,” Under Snoke no member of the First Order ever went hungry, because under Snoke if food ever got scarce, whoever was in charge of making sure there was enough of it just took it from whomever had it. Kylo hasn’t hit the point of any of his men missing meals, _yet._ But if he can’t get better control of this, he will. “but not so great in the sense that my men aren’t _getting_ what they need.”

“Fewer weapons?” She knows he’s spending _a lot_ of money on them. Cutting back, or dropping down just to replacement levels would free up a significant part of his budget, which might get food flowing better.

He groans at that, too, shoulders slumping. That’s actually another problem. He’s not just got to make sure the stuff ends up in the right place, at the right time, but he does have to pay for it, too. “Probably. As soon as I stop ordering them in bulk though, I’m sure it’ll get out, and I’m going to end up having to use the ones I’ve got.” He can feel that as soon as they realize he’s not the hardest target in the galaxy, someone is going to try to hit him.

“That’s why you’ve got them, right?”

He exhales, long and low at that. “I guess.” He flexes his feet, wriggling his toes, and looks at the wall, past her. “Castles or palaces…”

Her eyebrows knit together, so he explains the conversation he was having with Jon. She follows along, listening, nodding, thinking, adding bits and pieces she’s been reading about the history of the Old Republic. “Jon doesn’t know who you were, right?”

“If he does, he’s never let on. Not a single stray thought of it in his head. Why?”

“Sounds like he wants you to rebuild Alderaan.”

He sighs at that, too. “That worked out so well for them, didn’t it? ‘But Alderaan is peaceful!’” He mocks his mother’s voice. “Boom!’” He slides down, curling onto his side, facing her, resting his cheek against her thigh, and rubs his forehead again. She strokes his face, and he feels the headache start to slide away.

 

 

“They lasted for tens of thousands of years, and it ended when the Force had gotten so far out of balance, and so concentrated that it’d narrowed down to five sets of hands. If this,” she touches the Maji symbol, “works, that means we’re it. The last of the great powers. Maybe… it’s time to build palaces again?”

“Maybe…” He kisses her thigh, enjoying the feel of her body, and her calm, against him. “Or maybe you don’t have to be a Dark-side-mad Force-monster to blow up a planet. Hux would have done it in a heartbeat, just for fun, and he had about as much Force skill as a rock. Maybe, since the plans are out there, and it’s been done before, just plain, old human cussedness’ll take care of it?”

She kisses his thigh, silently acknowledging that he’s just as likely to be right as she is on this one.

His hand seeks out hers, and he says, voice quiet, “How do I add enough value to his universe to become untouchable, if I can’t even keep my people fed?” 

She squeezes his hand, no good answer for that. Then she shifts around, so they’re face to face, and she kisses his lips.

She taps her datapad. “I’ll read up on palaces, and the places that had them. You shift your resources. If Jakku was anything to go by, people will do a whole lot to protect the man who feeds them.”

He rolls his eyes, because he can feel her image of Plutt. “That’s not exactly who I want to be or where I want to go.”

She winces a little. “Bad example. The base point is still true. You’ve got several million people who are invested in making sure you succeed at this. They’ll keep you going if you hit a rough patch.”

“Or slit my throat.”

She shakes her head. “No.” Her eyes are on his. “And you feel it, too. You’re getting rid of the people who’ll do that, replacing them with people who want to be with you.”

He’s not convinced. She lays her palm against his chest, feeling how he’s stuck in his own dark, and having a hard time feeling anything else. “Feel it, love. It’s there.”

His eyes close, and he inhales deeply, pulling off of her own sense of the future. It’s clear and sharp and in her view, glowing, bright and steady.

Her flashes of the future, the shapes and sounds, are always like this, lighter, brighter than his. Light side versus dark, he supposes. His are likely better for seeing the pitfalls, the traps in the plan. Hers are better for the grand plan, the sense of how things could work out.

She kisses him again and then says, “Naboo. We’ll go there. Spend a few days, relax. You’re worn to a nub and need the downtime. And we’ll learn about palaces, because it was one, too, and…”

He kisses her, stopping that sentence for a moment. “And we’ll just be people for a few days.”

“Yeah.”  

 

 

* * *

When the orders for Citykillers trickle off, and when the orders for Tie fighters and Dreadnoughts drip down to just replacement rates, a susurrus of gossip begins to fly through the galaxy. No one knows what Master Ren is planning, but they all have speculations.

 


	25. The Rumor Master II

4/25/1 Y.O.

 

“And he’s leaving for three days?” General Kinear asks General Ritter. They’re both in their off-duty garb, Kinear prefering the flowing tunics that were considered casual wear when he was young, and still lived on Coruscant, Ritter in the more structured garb of the H'Lathnians. Just two old men, taking a bit of a stroll around the central market square of the F-deck, having a bit of a chat.

 

 

“That’s currently the plan. He’s _vacationing,_ ” Ritter sounds and looks amused by that. “And it looks like he’s willing to let me try my hand at undercover work again.”

Kinear smirks at that, eyes lit with amusement. “The last time you went undercover Palpatine was still sane.” He pauses for a moment, wanders to one of the vendors, buys a bag of roasted, salted nuts, and then returns to Ritter offering them to him.

Ritter takes two, smirks, a little, munches them down, and says. “I told him it had been a few years.”

Kinear laughs, a deep, rich sound. He doesn’t eat the nuts, doesn’t personally like them, he’s just got them for show. Part of blending in. “Decades you mean. Schiff tells me he’s bending on resource acquisition.” Kinear’s feeling very pleased by how this is working out. They’ve been gently encouraging Kylo to try more in the way of diplomacy and it looks like he just, might, possibly, be about to attempt something along those lines.

“Schiff also tells me that he _may_ have a friend.”

Kinear’s excited to hear that. “Who?”

“Major Frakes, Tactical Design Corps.”

“Bill Frakes’ boy?”

Ritter gestures, indicating he’s got no idea. “I wouldn’t know. Maybe.”

Kinear’s eyes light up. “Force be with us! If that’s Bill’s boy…”

“Who’s Bill Frakes?” Ritter asks, puzzled.

“He was a logistics officer on the second Death Star, good man. Steady. Not particularly brilliant or inspired, but he didn’t have to be. He just had to make sure anything loaded onto the Death Star got where it needed to go before it needed to be there.” Both of them know how big of a job that was. “Better, and more important than that, he was an _Empire_ man through and through, and so was the rest of his family. I had him under my command for about five years when he was fresh out of the Academy.”

Ritter looks like he’s tasting that, getting a feel for what they can do with it. “Schiff saw him leave while he was waiting to go in. He’s young… About Ren’s age. If he’s who you think he is, he had to have been born within a year of the destruction of the second Death Star. But Frakes has a name, so… he can’t be a Hux graduate, right?”

“In something specialized like design, Snoke likely preferred they weren’t.” They share a moment, understanding the limits of the Hux-method grads. Kinear thinks about his uniform, scanning the crowd seeing more than a hundred people wearing one within eye range, and sighs. “Granted, it looks like they just dusted these off and slightly re-tooled them, so… maybe not. What is he doing with Ren?”

“I don’t know. Designing something? Maybe he’s decided he finally wants a uniform? Tactical Design… That’s…” Ritter spends a moment thinking, trying to remember. Most of the people in the Order are in one of eight main divisions, and he knows them, their organizational structure, their up and comers, and old faithfuls by heart. But about ten percent of the people handle the other approximately 97,000 jobs that a functional empire needs, and he’s significantly less familiar with them. A moment of thinking finds what he’s looking for. “Uniforms, armor, our symbols, the _look_ of the Order. Whatever it is Ren’s getting, it’s the third or fourth time they’ve met. Ren keeps calling him back, and, apparently, calls him by his first name.”

Kinear eyes the banners with the Order symbol on them hovering above them. “I bet he designed that.”

Ritter nods. “Likely. And he was talking with Schiff about maybe doing some subversion. Maybe he’s looking to get gear set for that. Schiff had the appointment after Frakes, and heard was that they were going to have lunch together after Ren gets back.”

“Good. I’ll poke around Frakes some, get a sense for who he is. See if we can use him to help steer Ren. Are we set for the Master’s vacation?”

Ritter grins. “Oh yes. I’ve got it set. You know he took out four of the fifty on our list on his own, right?”

Kinear nods. “Hapian always was an idiot. If he’d had the sense of a lump of clay, he’d have gotten out of Ren’s view before he started plotting.”

“How’d he survive Snoke?”

“He was an idiot, but not so big of one to stay where Snoke could notice him. Like a lot of us, he got to the furthest extent of his territory and sent in glowing reports of whatever it was Snoke wanted to hear.”

It’s clear on Ritter’s face that he sympathizes with that technique. “Ren’s leaving on the 27th. First watch on the 28th, the forty-six who are left are going to get the same notice, at once, calling them to Resource Processing to immediately complete their retirement pages. I assume they’ll be there in about two minutes, half-asleep and deeply upset about said mix up. Everyone who’ll be in Resource Processing is ours. We’ll make sure they get everyone settled in conference room B8, complain about the computers glitching, head off to ‘fix the problem,’ and then gas the room. We’ll take out the lot of them at once, space their remains, and the paperwork will show that they all resigned at once and took transport to Coruscant. And if anyone checks, a ship will go, it will land on Coruscant, and from there the trail goes dead.”

Kinear smiles. “Excellent. Good riddance to bad rubbish. I suppose we need to start working on the next list?”

“Schiff’s already on it,” Ritter says. “And we’ve got eight of our own re-enlisted. Another ten are getting everything in order and will be joining up soon. More problems though, they’re starting to go through training, and… We’re going to have to make sure that lands under his eye soon, or we’re going to get fucked sideways on that.”

“How bad?” Kinear asks. His personal training was so long ago that he was a trainer for the Republic’s Clone Army. So, he’s at least five generations of techniques out of touch.

“Most of his training officers are Hux grads.”

Kinear grits his teeth. “Wonderful. Let’s make sure his vacation goes as smoothly as possible. If we’re lucky, he’ll decide on another rest in the not wildly distant future, and we’ll take advantage of that.”

“And, if not, maybe we can get him to go on some sort of diplomatic visit or something… Go see a newly freed colony, maybe,” Ritter says.

Kinear nods along, seeing it in his mind. “That would be good. If we can raise some of them, and have them join us, having him show up and ‘rally’ them, welcome them into the fold… They’d like that. He might, too.”

“I think he would,” Ritter says. “And even if he’s not much of a fan of it, it’d be good for morale in the new colonies.”

“Make them feel like they’re part of something big and important. Make them feel valued. Might want to see if we can get him to visit each of our capitol ships, too.”

“Snoke went years at a time without letting anyone lay eyes on him. Ren shouldn’t,” Ritter says, looking around at all of the people milling about. He guesses most of them couldn’t identify the Master if he wasn’t wearing his mask.

“Nope.” Kinear looks at Ritter. “Are you old enough to remember Palpatine before he became Emperor?”

“Barely. I was eleven when he took over.”

Kinear half inclines his head, men his age who aren’t firmly entrenched in their dotage, or firmly entrenched in their tombs, are few and far between. “Before he was maimed, he used to make sure to go visit his supporters, meet with them, make sure they had the image of a personable, useful, powerful man who would work with them to achieve their goals.”

Kinear sighs, remembering that version of the Emperor, though he was the Chancellor then. That was a man who knew how to _rule._ Who knew how to make the people around him _want_ his rule. But, he doesn’t have anyone like that to work with, and, really, never did. That version of Palpatine’s been gone for decades, and no one even remotely like him has come about since.

“That might be trying to get more out of the Master than he can give,” Ritter says, seeming to be thinking along the same lines.

Kinear thinks about it. Given the Master’s family, assuming those rumors he’s been able to collect are true, he _should_ have some natural talent for this. _Deeply buried._  “Maybe, but… We’ll never know if we don’t try, and if we set it up right, have him meet with people who want him to do well, because they’ll do well because of him…”

“Baby steps.”

“Baby steps. He doesn’t seem averse to learning how to do this, so we might as well work on making sure he gets the lessons,” Kinear says with a smile, and plans.

“Do you think any of the decorum teachers they used to foist us onto are still around?” Ritter asks.

Kinear laughs. “There’s a memory.” Just like being several generations out of date on his training techniques, he also predates what Ritter’s talking about, but he remembers it.

Palpatine had an idea of his officer corps. Polished, genteel, _good_ representatives of the Empire. They could go anywhere, deal with anyone, ruffle no feathers until feathers needed to be ruffled. After all, Palpatine preferred to use diplomacy. He had a very definite idea of an iron fist in a silk glove. His officers, especially the higher up ones, were supposed to be able to negotiate, to soothe unhappy temperaments, to seek accord for the greater good of the Empire, and then, if such methods didn’t work, they were expected to utterly flatten anyone who didn’t take the easy route.

They were governors as much as soldiers, and as such, they were expected to have _manners._

No one, no matter how useful in his or her respective field, got above Major without proving they had manners. And if they didn’t, Palpatine made sure there were lessons available. Ritter’s young enough he likely went through the decorum classes. Kinear’s old enough that he’s one of the ones who rubber stamped the idea and took his officers out of the line long enough for them to take the classes.

“If you can remember any of their names,” Kinear says, “you might as well hunt them down. I don’t know if we can get him to agree to it, but if there’s a chance of it, let’s have someone ready to go at a moment’s notice.”

“I’ll check my records. And if I can’t find the ones we used, there’s got to be _someone_ who does it.”

“Someone…”


	26. Erotic

 

4/27/1

 

It’s a bizarre sensation. In the, as best as Rey can tell, twenty-fourish years she’s been alive, she’s never had a day like this, one where all she has to do is… nothing.

She just has to be. She’s got nothing to build, no plans to work on, she’s not studying hard to try and fill in the blanks of where her life is supposed to go, there’s just… Sitting in a shuttle, waiting to get to where they’re going and then… playing.

Kylo’s aware enough of what she’s thinking to say, “I was eight. The last holiday I went on with my parents.”

“What’d you do?”

“Just stayed home.” He smiles, a little, remembering it. “They were pretty much never both at home at the same time, and I was _always_ at lessons. Math and engineering, and at least half a dozen languages, and I had to be able to read them as well as speak them, and civics, and history, and…” He shakes his head. “Anyway, they both came home, and we laid around, and went swimming in the pond, and had picnics on the beach, and…” she can feel him falling back into the memory, “we made a little X-wing. It even had a tiny R2 on it. Dad wanted it to be radio controlled, but that was boring, and I could make it fly with the Force, so… We built it up and painted the little details, and I flew it around the pond…”

“That sounds good.”

“It was.” He nods, staring out at the stars.

 

* * *

 

For Kylo, the bizarre sensation comes a few hours later, once they’ve landed at Ulinada on Naboo. It’s a small city, or a very large town, between two lakes, about two thousand kilometers from Theed, and supposedly popular for beaches, old-fashioned charm, good food, and decent hotels.

It’s a nice place where people from the capitol and bigger cities go to get away for a few days.

Rey figured that was pretty much everything they’d need, and Kylo… or Ben Amidala… booked a place. And it’s true that all of that felt a bit odd, but this moment, right here, is just downright _bizarre._

It’s a _vacation._ And he’s being _just a person._ And putting on Padme’s clothes and packing them up, and looking like a trader going off for a few days felt a little odd, but… It’s not like he’s never done it before, and each time he slips into colored trousers and a light shirt and the leather jacket it feels more like him… or at least a legitimate version of him, and less like he’s wearing a costume.

But there’s one part of this that’s giving him pause and has him staring with longing.

If he’s going to be Ben Amidala off on vacation with his wife for a few days, Master of the Order Kylo Ren’s lightsaber cannot come with him. So, like the boxes of currency that’s mostly not any good on this planet, he’s got his saber locked into a hidden storage bin under one of the seats.

When he finally realized he couldn’t bring the saber, when he was tucking all of his Padme clothing into the sack they’ve got their gear in, he’d thought maybe he could bring the light short sword, substitute it for his usual lightsaber, but, as Rey pointed out when he was hooking it onto his belt, he’s trying to _not_ remind people of Kylo Ren, and swapping out one laser sword for another isn’t likely to have that effect.

He almost brought the blaster, but… This is supposed to be a peaceful town. It’s not a hangout for scoundrels and villains and scum. This is supposed to be the sort of place where the only people who carry weapons are local law enforcement.

Rey watches him staring at the seat where he’s enclosed the currency she’ll be taking back to Lirium and his saber. She lays her hand in the middle of his back, and nods to him.

“I don’t think I could leave without it,” she says of her staff. As long as it’s not lit, it just looks like a fancy walking stick, and it’s definitely going with them. 

He nods back, and sighs a little. “I can stop blaster fire mid-air, I can kill a man with a thought, but this feels…” He bites his lip. “I’ve never gone anywhere I couldn’t call a weapon to hand in a moment since I’ve been an adult.”

“I know.” And she does. She _really_ does. “Come on. Sooner we’re out there, the more normal this will feel.”

He inclines his head, indicating he’s not sure of that, but he shoulders their bag, and lowers the ramp, getting ready to explore Ulinada.

 

 

* * *

It’s a very pretty little city on the shores of two moderately sized lakes. In the background, they can see high cliffs with waterfalls streaming down them.

The buildings are what Kylo thinks of as old-fashioned. They put him in mind of history lessons from his childhood.

For Rey they’re entirely new. She knows wood is a thing. She’s heard about it. She’s seen pictures of it in some of Orlac’s books. She’s seen the cradle that Rose and Finn have put together. She remembers the forest on Starkiller and when she first met Kylo, but… This whole town is made of buildings with _wood_ and…

 

 

 

“Half-timbering,” Kylo says. “It’s old. Wood frames, plaster walls, more wood for details.”

“No plasteel?”

“Predates it. Though by now the insides are probably modernized, and the outsides look like this because it’s pretty.”

“You think it’s pretty?” She’s not sure if she likes it or not. It’s really _different._

He looks around… Half-timbered buildings, some of them white plaster and dark woods, others tinted bright pinks and blues with lighter woods, most of the windows have little boxes with flowers growing in them. He’s guessing the roofs are supposed to look like tile or slate, but he can’t imagine anyone still uses that. The street below their feet is carefully maintained cobblestone. He can see two crossroads from where they are, and both of them have burbling fountains in them.

It’s a city, supposedly, but he’s got the sense it was designed for foot traffic. There are likely bigger, more modern roads further out, but this area right here is supposed to be quaint, or something.

He thinks about it for another moment, and then answers her question, “Yes.”

 

 

* * *

Their hotel, which takes them about half an hour to find, is supposed to have ‘Old-fashioned charm.’ And they aren’t exaggerating. It’s ancient, or at least a good replica of it. It’s three stories of pale plaster, dark wood, a slate roof, and at each window there’s a box overflowing with pink and purple flowers.

There’s an actual door.

Made of carved wood.

With _hinges._

Rey’s never seen one before, and it takes him a moment to remember how to use a doorknob. (He presses his palm to it, gives it a gentle pull, and is a little startled when the door doesn’t open. After a few seconds, he remembers these things have to _turn._ )

Once inside, there’s a small open area, with a few sofas around a fireplace, though, since it’s summer, no fire is burning, and on the far end, there’s a check-in counter and a set of stairs leading up to the second floor.

They glance at each other, and head for the desk.

A middle-aged lady smiles at them, looking them over with more interest than Kylo would have expected, and says, “Amidalas?”

Kylo nods, feeling it’s the name that’s got her attention, and Rey says, “Yes.”

“Great, just sign in and we’ll get you your room key.” She taps the register as she turns to root around in a drawer behind the desk, probably hunting for the key.

The register is an actual book, of paper, with neatly lined spaces, and a pen. Kylo looks at it and almost goggles. He has a signature, a very nice one. Technically speaking, he’s got _two_ very nice ones, actually. Luke thought calligraphy was a good way for young Jedi to learn fine muscle control and meditate, and because there was nothing particularly light about making pretty letters on a piece of paper, Kylo was actually good at it from the first time he held a brush, but neither of those nice signatures is Ben Amidala.

He realizes as Rey’s staring at it, that she can’t write. She’s never seen a pen before, never learned to form her letters. That’s not rare, not in any world that lives and dies by digital, but it is something he didn’t know about her.

“Aurebesh keyboard?” he asks, figuring he’s better off acting like they’re both from a part of the galaxy that doesn’t use pens.

The desk clerk pulls one up from under the desk, and Rey looks at it, but doesn’t touch it. That’s when it hits Kylo that Rey can’t write, period. Whatever it is the Force does that allows her to read has not resulted in the ability to make letters or arrange them into words.

He takes the keyboard and puts in her name: Rey Amidala. Reserving the rooms for Rey and _Ben_ Amidala was uncomfortable enough, he’s not about to type it now if he doesn’t have to.

Fortunately, Rey Amidala brings up their reservation, and from there getting their key is easy and slick.

The check-in lady, noticing both of them staring at the key like they’d never seen one before, because neither of them have, decides to walk them up to their room.

“Getting a quick break from the capitol?” she asks.

“We’re from further afield than that,” Rey replies.

Kylo didn’t miss the desk clerk’s interest in the name they gave, so he adds, “Family history trip. We’ve tracked the name back to here. Hoping to learn more about where I come from.”

“Oh.” She holds up the key, and shows them how to put it into the door knob, and then turn it to the left. “Opens the lock.” Then she turns it all the way to the right. “Locks the lock.” She returns it to the neutral position, pulls it out, and hands it to Kylo.

He gets the lock unlocked, and she nods, satisfied that he knows what he’s doing, and then says, “Good luck on your hunt.”

He offers her a little smile. “Thank you.”

 

 

* * *

It’s a nice room, bright, lots of coral colors and summer sunlight streaming through gauzy curtains. And once inside, it’s a lot more modern looking than the outside of the building or the public room downstairs. The bed is comfortably springy. There’s more than enough closet space, granted neither of them brought much clothing. Everything they’ve got with them is on their backs or in the one sack Kylo’s carrying. They’ve got their own bathroom, with a tub and shower and lots of towels. It’s everything they could possibly need for a night.

The chronometer tells them that by local time, it’s morning.

And it only took two hours to get here, so it’s not like either of them is tired.

They look at each other and…

“Explore?” Rey says.

“Sure.” He opens the bag, digs through it, finding the credit sticks, and hands one over to her, before tucking his into his pocket.

She puts their bag into the closet, and calls her staff to hand. He takes her other hand in his. And then they’re off to see what’s here.

 

 

* * *

It’s probably, not in the great scheme of things, a huge market. Like most of this city, it’s bigger than anywhere Rey’s ever been, or anywhere Kylo’s ever lingered, but it’s not, even by the scale of Naboo, big.

It’s the main market in a second tier city on an edge of the middle rim planet.

Experienced travelers would likely find it “quaint.”

It’s still more stuff, by a factor of at least a thousand, than Rey’s ever seen at one place at one time. They spend _hours_ roaming through it. The food stalls alone take up the whole morning. Neither of them have ever seen this many different types of fruit and vegetable and fish and meats and little cooked snacks and… And everything that looks or smells interesting, they’ve got to at least try.

The merchants love them because neither of them knows to bargain with them. They say a price. Rey hands them her credit stick. And off they go, nibbling on something new.

Kylo notices that maybe one out of five people really _look_ at him, startled, so he keeps waving his hand and muttering, “Not him” at the ones who stare.

It works well enough, but after two hours of wandering, he and Rey sit down on a bench at one of the fountains, sharing a crispy pastry filled with frozen melon mush, and work their way through figuring out how to work the spell so he doesn’t have to keep redoing it. They settle on shifting his _do not look_ to _do not recognize._ (Kylo mutters under his breath: _This is not the Master you’re looking for._ And Rey sniggers a bit, because she’s heard that story, told by Threepio, too.) After all, he wants to keep wandering and shopping, and that won’t work if they don’t _look._

They’re not sure if it worked, but for the rest of the afternoon, no one stares at him beyond the cursory gaze given to a customer, so… probably.

 

* * *

Beyond the main market are streets lined with shops, and with nothing set to do, they continue to roam.

He feels her looking at it, and his eyes trace over to it, too. It’s a dress, in a shop window, pretty and green and unlike anything else she owns, or has ever imaged owning. Apparently, local women’s fashion involves a lot of flowy fabric in bright, pretty colors. Some dresses are long, covering the feet of the person wearing them, and some are short, just barely brushing thighs, but they’re all in dresses.

Rey in her tunic and trousers and armwraps doesn’t exactly blend here. He can feel her thinking that maybe she’d like to blend.

He smiles at the idea, and leans down, almost kissing the words on her ear, “Go buy it.”

“It’s probably expensive.”

He shrugs. There’s more than 300,000 credits in his account because his accounting department is still scouring the _Supremacy_ for currency. And it might be expensive, but it’s not six years of his income expensive. “So? You want to wear it, and I want to see you in it.”

She chuckles at that. “Come with me.”

So he does.

 

 

* * *

The first one is too big. She figures she’s about medium-sized so a medium-sized dress should fit.

It doesn’t.

And she knows it doesn’t before she steps out of the dressing room to let Kylo see it. Among other things, the top is supposed to stay up over her bust, not pool around her hips. She tosses it over the door to him and says, “Small.”

So he gets one.

 

 

* * *

The fabric between his fingers is sinfully soft and smooth. It’s pine forest green, a mix of bright, sharp greens on a darker, softer, black-green background.

He can’t wait to see it on her, and wants to take if off of her even more. Or maybe just push it out of the way. It’s a dress, it’s not like it’s got to come off…

Well… it might not, but she has underthings and they’re… He remembers what Frakes said about different underthings to go with different trousers. The dress in his hand should likely only come to her mid thighs, and she usually wears little shorts under her pants… and the top doesn’t have anything that goes over her shoulders, and her normal undershirt has straps, so…

She probably needs different underthings, too, and the idea of getting them makes him glad he’s carrying a dress in front of him. His trader outfit is decidedly lacking in anything that hangs down in front of him.

He bites his lip, coming to the conclusion that he may decide that he actually likes having money to spend on things, or at least on Rey, if it could buy… things… maybe little… lacy… things… for her. To put on, and look at, and maybe, let him take off… or… he shivers a little at the idea… _rip_ off of her.

He looks around the shop as he’s wandering back to the changing area, but he doesn’t see anything that looks like underclothes, so… not here apparently.

He knows which of the changing rooms she’s in, so he slips the lock and steps in. It’s tight quarters for the two of them, just a little bigger than her shower.

“Kylo!” She doesn’t cover up or anything. It’s not like she’s shy about being in her shorts in front of him. He appreciates the view, her, no undershirt, hair down, body soft and tan in front of him.

He bites his lip again, teasing her, teasing himself, reminding himself of the feel of her teeth on his lip, and then holds out the dress.

She holds her arms up, smiling at him, apparently deciding that if he’s going to come in he might as well help her dress.

He’s got to take a moment to think about how to get it onto her, but apparently it’s just a soft tube of fabric, so he gets it settled. There’s a small bit that goes around her neck, and she turns around, lifting her hair, exposing the back of her neck to him.

His hands shake a little as he hooks the fabric shut, setting it smooth and green into a snug embrace around her throat.

He bends, kissing just above the collar, and just below, before stepping back enough to see the dress on her.

It’s fairly loose, save for a gather of tighter fabric around her neck. The rest of it gently flows over her, covering her from just about where the token would land if it weren’t around his neck, to mid-thigh. It’s very soft, and pretty, and he’s staring down at her, thinking that what he might like better than interesting lacy underthings is knowing there aren’t any underthings between him and her and… It’s not particularly cool in here, but her nipples are hard, and he can see them through the dress and… Gods, this is probably so horribly inappropriate, but all he wants to do is unbutton his trousers and slip into her and feel that dress under his fingers as his body slides into hers.

He can feel her smirking at him, see it, too, along with a sense of _not here._

_Soon?_

_Yes. Now get out of here before I decide to change my mind._

His turn to smirk. _You know, that’s not terribly motivating to get me out of here._

 

__

 

She trails her fingers over the front of his trousers, cupping him gently, and his eyes slip shut as his hips rock forward. _I know. Maybe I don’t really want you to leave._

In a heartbeat, less, she’s in his arms, crushed against his body, and he’s reveling in the feel of her soft body under that fabric.

He’s aware enough of the fact that they’re in a shop in the middle of the day, with other people around that he doesn’t groan, though he does lay his lips against her shoulder and let her feel the moan in his mind.

She’s rubbing up against him, deliberately, also enjoying the feel of him through the silk. It’s smooth and slippery, but not wet, and feels different but good, and… Still this is the first nice thing she’s ever been in danger of owning, and she doesn’t want to ruin it before she even gets it paid for.

And that’s the thought that stops her cold. She’s already wet, and the dress is _right_ against her, where his thigh is between her legs, and if she soaks her shorts, which is certainly possible, or if he does, which is certain if this goes where they both want it to…

It’s an act of tremendous will power, but she puts her hands on his hips and pushes him back.

_Let’s pay for it before we wreck it._

He mentally whimpers at that idea. Then he makes himself step back, and she can feel him forcing the control over himself. Another moment, with his eyes closed, and his shaft won’t be leading the way out of the changing stall.

“Okay,” he says, calm and in control again.

“Okay,” she looks up at him with a grin, and then wiggles her fingers at the door, knowing that this will go a lot easier if she takes the dress off without an audience or _help_.

And, with nothing to do for a few moments, Kylo wanders around the store, gathering up three more dresses, all of them fairly similarly shaped, but in different colors. Right now the idea of her in flushed pinks, and vibrant blues, and one color that he doesn’t know the name of, but it’s halfway between pink and orange, and he thinks she’ll look like a sunset, the way he thinks sunsets are supposed to look, in it.

Maybe it took gray for them to get together, but he’s thinking maybe part of where they’re supposed to go is a world, galaxy, with _color._ He tries to imagine what Jon would do it he said he wanted some outfits, for Master Ren, in something other than black or gray. Probably have a stroke. Still… might be amusing.

The lady who runs the place is apparently no stranger to somewhat turned-on husbands roaming around her shop, so when he heads to the counter with the dresses, she smirks at him. “Having fun?”

He nods.

She chuckles. And then glances at Rey in her street clothing as she joins them. Apparently, she looks far enough out of her normal element that she asks, “Honey, do you have sandals to go with this?”

Her boots are thick, sturdy, practical, and apparently, _not_ the sort of foot gear that goes with this. The shop lady nods at that, takes a card out from behind the counter, and writes two addresses on it. “Go visit both.”

 

 

* * *

He can’t read the card. Unlike him, this woman does not have a neat, tidy, formally trained in proper Aurebesh calligraphy script. She’s got some local version of the letters that look, maybe, sort of, like the ones he learned.

Fortunately, he knows someone who doesn’t have to actually _read_ the words to know what they say.

He hands it over to Rey, and she has no problem with it.

As they’re walking to the first of the shops, Rey says, “You can do this, can’t you?”

He raises an eyebrow at her.

“Write? I mean, by hand.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you sign us in?”

“Because putting Kylo Ren into the register would have raised more than a few eyebrows.” He can feel her not understanding. “Signatures are different than other words. Anyone watching would know that I don’t sign Ben Amidala the way I should. I’d have to actually think about it to make it look right.” She’s looking at him curiously, still not exactly getting it. “The first thing I learned to write was Ben Solo. The first thing most people learn how to write is their name. I can do it with my eyes closed. Kylo Ren is just as easy. So, I could whip through the Ben with no problems… other than I don’t like writing it… and then have to remember how to put Amidala together because I’ve never written that before.”

“Oh.” She thinks about it. “Was it hard to learn?”

“I didn’t find it so. I don’t imagine you would, either.”

She nods at that. “If we see a pen and ink, I’d like to get it.”

He smiles at that, and another thought springs to mind. “Brushes.”

“Brushes?”

“They’ll be more fun.” 

She doesn’t know what he means by that, and he’s fine with it. A little smile on his face.

 

 

* * *

Kylo doesn’t find shoes nearly as inspiring as dresses. And Rey’s not nearly as interested in them, either. The first pair of sandals that fit are the ones she grabs, and then they’re out of there, hunting for the second place on the list.

 

 

* * *

The second shop makes Kylo wonder if the lady in the dress shop had some Force skill or was just _really_ good at reading people. Or maybe, like Jon, she just knows how the underthings are supposed to look based on what the outer outfit is doing.

It’s a place that sells underthings, for women.

He also decides that if he goes into this shop, they aren’t getting out of it without him getting into her, so he gives her a long, wet kiss, holding her close, and then says, “Surprise me,” before going off in search of something to amuse himself for a while. 

Specifically, he goes off looking for a calligraphy set.

 

 

* * *

There are things that most people learn, more or less on their own, through trial and error, usually during their teens and early twenties.

Among these things is often a personal sense of _sexy._

An idea or ideal of how one goes about looking and being attractive, not just in the conventional _appreciate me as an appealing person_ sort of way, but in a _get over here and jump my bones_ sort of way, too.

This would be something that neither Rey nor Kylo ever managed to do. Between lack of opportunity or interest, it’s just not something either of them had ever given much thought to.

Being both Force sensitive and trained in how to use it, Kylo was at least _aware_ of how people looked at him, but when with Luke, doing anything to encourage anyone to look at him with anything other than platonic, friendly love was frowned upon. Add in the fact that half of the students were at least mildly scared of him, he did his best not to spend too long aware of what they may have been thinking about him.

With Snoke, where he could have explored that space, he didn’t. He kept the mask on most of the time. The first four women he had sex with never saw his face. (Or really, any of him except his penis. Kylo Ren hadn’t sunk into his bones at that point, and he wasn’t about to take him off just to get sucked.) They thought he was ugly or disfigured, and he didn’t much care. For the first three years, he made sure everyone who got near him felt fear, and by then, if he noticed someone interested in him sexually, he stayed away from them. The First Order tended to attract or make people who liked to fuck monsters. He had no use for them. Eventually he rose high enough he began to attract people for his power, and they interested him more. By then, Kylo had sunk into his bones, and he was comfortable taking the mask, and the rest of his clothing, off. Most of them were pleasantly surprised when they saw that he was not, in fact, ugly or disfigured.

And he was pleasantly surprised to see that they liked his body. Apparently he’d grown into it sometime between putting the mask on for the first time, and then taking it off.

For Rey, becoming sexy was a weapon, one aimed at her throat. She didn’t welcome it, and did her best to hide it. By the time her period started arriving regularly she was quick, and strong, and fairly good with her staff, but even quick, and strong, and fairly good with a staff wasn’t a match for several grown men. The second time it happened, she moved out of Niima Station, to the downed AT-AT.

Drunk men didn’t have a problem risking getting a broken jaw or hand to grab her and hold her down. But they weren’t willing to walk three miles into the desert to search for her. Not when there were other girls and boys closer.

And that was, until Rey had Chewie drop her off at the _Supremacy_ , the sum total of both of their experience with sexy.

If you were to ask her, Rey would tell you that the reason she got a shower, took most of her hair out of its buns, put on a nice clean outfit, located some lip balm in the Falcon (she doesn’t want to think about how old it was) and put it on, before stuffing herself into a shuttle pod to be shipped to Kylo, was that it was more comfortable. Laying with your hair in buns makes your head sore. Clean skin and clothing feels nice. And the air cycling on those things is just murder on your lips, they dry out really fast, and she didn’t want them cracked and bleeding, and that was that.

It had _nothing_ to do with being attractive.

And if it just happened to sort of… work… well… sheer luck or the Force at work.

And, if feeling her come, sensing her drawing nearer, Kylo just happened to get a shower, hunt down a clean tunic and shirt, and spent some time brushing his hair, and almost started to shave again before he decided that was complete overkill that was just… killing time. He had to do something to fill the two hours it took her to get there. And okay, the handcuffs were not exactly his idea but he knew they had to be part of this so he got the most comfortable looking ones he could find, and maybe he spent a little extra time deciding if he wanted the cloak or not, but…

It wasn’t like he was _trying_ to look good or anything.

Not consciously.

In retrospect, he probably made Snoke laugh. At least the fucker got one good chuckle before he cut him in half.

But here, on a pleasantly sunny summer day in Ulinada, there are no knives. No monsters. Just him, and her, and a flavor of playtime neither of them have ever explored before, and the idea of it is intriguing.

So Rey finds some pretty, little underthings to put under some pretty, little dresses. And Kylo finds that calligraphy set, and eventually, they find each other.

 

 

* * *

When they find each other again, he’s _very_ interested in seeing what’s in that bag of hers.

She catches his interest, heady, like a scent on the air, and blushes, a little, and then looks to his bag. “You found a pen?”

He nods. “That, too. Brushes, ink, paper, pencils.” He rolls his eyes a little. “Maybe one day Master Padme will teach the little boogers to write.”

She smiles at that idea. “I thought you said you weren’t going to be teaching children to meditate.”

“It’s not the same.”

She looks up at him, amused. “Of course not.”

He nudges the bag with the dresses in it. “What was that about fancy ballrooms?”

She shrugs, and then an idea hits. “Do you think there are places to dance here?”

That stops him mid-stride, getting him thinking in a different direction. “Probably.” He hadn’t been thinking much past getting Rey into one of those dresses, admiring it and her, taking it off of her, and then showing her what he can do with a calligraphy brush, but… Going out with her… He’s got an image in his mind of her in one of the dresses, knowing that his words are written on her skin under it, and it’s flushing through him, hot and urgent. “We should do that.”

Apparently he projected that image, because she’s looking up at him, and this time it’s her intrigue that’s wafting about like a scent on the air. “You want to write on me?”

He nods, swallowing hard as the idea continues to solidify in his head. “Yes.” He licks his lips. “I think it’ll feel good, and I know it’ll look good.”

They’re both, without really noticing it, moving back toward their hotel.

“What would you write?”

He’s not entirely certain, yet, but he’s got a feeling he won’t be low on inspiration if she’s stretched out naked in front of him.

“Is there anything you wouldn’t want me to write on you?”

Turned back at her, she’s thinking about it. “Would other people be able to see it?”

“Only if you plan on taking that dress off with other people around.”

She chuckles at that. “Can I draw on you?”

That thrills through him, too. “As much as you want.”

 

 

* * *

“You really used to do this?” Rey asks, watching him lay out the calligraphy set once they’re back in their hotel room.

He smiles, a little, dipping one of the brushes into a glass of water, and then dripping it onto the cake of black ink. “Until I was sixteen, this is what I was best at.”

“Writing?”

He half-shrugs. “It’s not a light skill. I was always better at meditating if I could move while doing it, and this took control and concentration, but not a particularly calm or peaceful heart. Even angry, the letters still look good. Look better, actually. I could write whatever I liked. Maybe we were supposed to be writing down Jedi sayings and whatnot, but in my own cottage, practicing on my own… I could be as angry on the paper as I liked.”

That makes sense to her, except for the age part. “Why until you were sixteen?”

He rolls his eyes at that. “I got my growth late. For a while, we all assumed I was just going to be short, like Luke and Mom. I was strong for my size, and most of the rest of my… grown up bits… were grown up. I was shaving once or twice a week, but I was still smaller than you are until I was sixteen. By seventeen, I was as tall as Luke, and by eighteen I was half a head taller. And by twenty I had the reach and muscle to outfight everyone there. Luke kept saying size didn’t matter and the best lightsaber wielder ever was Yoda, and he was barely a meter tall, but from everything I can see, if you are practicing against other people who can use the Force, too, it helps to have a good long reach, and once I had more reach than Luke did, I started to beat him.”

Rey laughs at that, and gently bumps him with her hip. “You didn’t beat me.”

That gets an epic eye roll from him followed by a somewhat harder bump back, enough to push her a half-step back. He’s not angry, just snarky, and looking to put into perspective exactly how much bigger he is. “Yeah, you beat me. I’d just killed my father, and been shot in the side, and slashed in the right arm, slashed in the leg, and stabbed in the shoulder, sliced through the face, the planet we were on was ripping apart, so more than a million First Order men were panicking, and Snoke was screaming in my head, and so were you, and I was trying not to hurt you, so, yeah _you beat me._ Try it again when I’m not dying inside, and see how it goes. Luke’s teachings on that were _wrong_ , size does matter.”

She sticks out her tongue at him, but doesn’t challenge that, because, honestly, no she hadn’t forgot that, and having seen him go up against the Praetorian guard, she knows that in a straight fight, both of them at full strength, she _can’t_ take him down… or at least, she can’t _keep_ him down. Like on Starkiller, she could probably knock him down, but he’d keep getting back up. She’s not sure if he’s a better fighter than she is, but he can take more pain then she can. Chewie shot him, Finn got him in the right arm, she got him in the leg, and then through the left shoulder, and he was still strong enough to almost fight her to a standstill before she dropped him with the cut to the face. And he was getting back up for another round when the planet spit apart between them.

He’s got the training to pull off of his pain, use it as fuel, and she doesn’t. And if it ever came to straight fight between the two of them, that’s where he’d win.

He nods, feeling satisfied to see she’s not challenging that, and then picks a little ink up on the brush, and begins on the paper, fingers deftly slipping along. It’s been a while, but this still feels good, familiar. Under his brush, black swathes begin to form, and Rey can see what he means about even angry the letters would look good. They’re made for fast, deft strokes, and calm or not, they’ll work.

He fills the paper fast, not really thinking too much about the words, just the feel of the brush in his hand and on the paper.

She’s seeing the marks on the paper, actually seeing _them_ for once, before switching over to reading. Apparently, this is him thinking about what he liked about this.

_As a Jedi, we never created anything. We were there to ‘preserve’ the Force or the ‘balance.’ To protect the light. The First Order was supposed to create, but it didn’t. Action was about pain and tearing things down. But this, brush in hand, is about creating something, even if it is only black ink on white paper._

She moves around to his left side, and kisses his left shoulder, so as not to bump his right.

“Creation comes about in the balance.”

He nods. “Can I put that on you?”

She’s pulling off her belts. “Yes.”

Tunic, pants, and shorts follow quickly. She’s about to take off the arm wraps, but he shakes his head.

“You want me to keep them on?”

He nods. “It’ll look good.”

She’s not sure about that, but doesn’t mind indulging him. She’s standing next to the bed and looks from him to it and back again.

“On your stomach.” He’s working the water into the block of ink, wanting the liquid extra black, and a little thicker than normal, and then taking most of it off the brush. He’s not sure how long it’ll take to dry on skin, but he doesn’t want a wet, drippy mess. Then he pulls off his shirt, knowing he's likely to get some ink on it.

Rey settles on the bed, laying on her belly, looking over her shoulder at him. She wiggles her hips at him, saying, “Coming?”

His eyes are warm as they trail down her body. “Yes!”

 

 

He sits next to her, his fingers lightly stroking the path of her spine. The dress covers the nape of her neck, bares her shoulders, and then covers from just below her shoulder blades to mid-thigh.

He starts at the crest of her left hip, and follows the line of it, across her buttock. His letters are tidy and flowing, sliding across her skin, and he can feel the way Rey wants to wriggle at it.

He lays his lips at the bottom of her spine, kissing lightly before saying, “Too tickly?”

“No. It’s… wet and intense and… different.”

“Good different?”

“Good different.”

His brush isn’t made for fine detail work. The Aurebesh glyphs don’t need that, and, to his eye at least, look better with a fuller stroke. So, with this brush, he can’t do a proper symbol of the Maji. He can’t trail the white and black into each other, lines thinning into gray. He can curl his black ink into a dot, and then pull the ink into a thinning tail, spinning it around the same shape of negative space. It’s not perfect, but given what he’s got to work with, he likes it.

“Circles?”

He nods. “Might be easier if you just watch through my eyes.”

He feels her shift, the sudden presence in the back of his mind. And then he’s alone in there again.

“Problem?”

“Looking at myself through you is just… weird.”

He smirks at that. And then strokes her right hip… “What goes here?” He lightly strokes the blunt end of the pen across her hip, and she wriggles at that, too. His lips follow, light nipping kisses. Then he writes: _Life began in the gray_ on her other hip.

He blows gently across all of the words, working on drying them.

She moans at that, and he grins. 

He shifts around her, so he’s facing her feet, and begins just above his not quite Maji circle. _Luscious, gorgeous, delicious Rey,_ spreads up her spine, and she does her best not to shiver while he’s writing.

He lays his pen on the holder, and blows on her back again, laying soft kisses between black words.

He’s feeling a little naughty, a little playful, so he gently bites the soft curve where left butt cheek becomes leg, and then writes _nip_ and matches it with _kiss_ on the other side.

“What did you just write?”

He smirks, giggling a little. “You know, if you don’t look through my eyes, you’ll have to use a mirror. I wonder, can you read backwards?”

He feels her roll her eyes, and then gasp, as he gently strokes the insides of her thighs, between his latest words. “According to you, I can’t read at all.”

“I’ve never said that. Just that whatever it is you do with your books, it’s not reading.”

She doesn’t feel like that’s much different, but his fingers caress a little higher, just barely brushing her muff, banishing that thought. She rocks her hips at that, spreading her legs a little wider apart. He blows lightly on her back and legs, hoping this is helping it dry faster. He wants her on her back, wants to trail more words all over her skin, wants to trail his skin all over hers.

He blows again, and she squirms against it, arching into the sensation.

He smiles, enjoying this, a lot.

One of his fingers stretches out, gently rubbing the last senth in kiss. It doesn’t smear. “Flip over.” His voice is lower than normal, softer, and he likes it that way. Likes all of this, gentle touches, teasing strokes, soft sounds, pretty, pretty, pretty Rey spread out before him covered in his marks.

He’s hard, probably has been the whole time, but he knows this is way more in his head than in his shaft. Everything about this makes him _happy,_ and his body’s going along for the ride the best way it knows how.

He sets the brush down, and kisses from her jaw to her hip. Light, gentle caresses of his lips against her skin.

“Going to mark each one?” Rey asks.

“Nope.” He shifts again, knees against her hip, and calls the brush to his hand. He touches it, just the tip, to right above her delta, and writes, “Leth, isk, forn, ekt,” in a curving half circle up to her navel, and then on the other side, mirroring it back down, “Leth, osk, vev, ekt.”

“Life and love?”

He gently lays his lips in the center of the circle, looking up at her, eyes warm and playful. “One day?”

She strokes her fingers through his hair. “One day.”

His lips slide into a wide, exultant smile, and he kisses her again. Then he’s up on his hands, kissing her lips, and she traces her thumb across his chin, smiling at him. “You’ve got some ink on your chin.”

He starts to laugh, giddy, bubbly feelings pouring out of him.

 _Joy_ he writes that on her hip, wild vibrant letters, his hand loose and easy. He spent so long in the dark, that bright feeling like these are still alien, foreign territory to be explored, but as he traces _peace_ across her ribs, and _ecstasy_ below it, he feels like he’s starting to get the lay of the land.

 _Lady Ren_ he teases that across her belly.

 _Beloved_ circles her left nipple.

“Kylo.”

It takes him a moment to realize she’s telling him what to write next, not just getting his attention. That flushes through him, like any reminder of her seeing _him,_ as he truly is, and accepting it.

“Where?”

She touches her naked breast, and he glows with the idea of that.

“Krill, yirt, leth, osk.” The letters are swift, fluid, well-practice and elegant on her skin.

“And if I wanted my name on you?”

He hands her the brush. “Pick a spot,” he says, pulling off his trousers and shorts.

She kisses his upper thigh, thinking that looks like a fine spot to have her name. He gently rolls the brush in the ink, blotting off the extra and writes it, saying, “Resh, eskt, yirt.” He’s doing it upside down, wanting it right way up for her, so this isn’t quite as fluid or well-practiced, but the easy swipes of black ink on pale skin look nice.

She blows on his skin, helping the ink dry a little faster, and then takes the brush from him. “Do you mind if I can see it even if you’ve got a shirt on?”

“No.”

“Good, lay back.”

He does, and she takes his right hand in hers, stretching his arm to the side. She’s not sure if she wants to start at his shoulder or his hand, and spends a moment stroking her fingers up and down the inside of his arm.

He can, to a degree, feel what she’s thinking, so he says, “Elbow. You’ll have an easier time spacing it out if you start in the center and work your way out.”

Then he closes his eyes and relaxes as she settles next to him. The brush is, of course, cool and wet against his skin. Even wet, he can feel the bristles are soft, but that’s intentional, he always preferred a soft brush to a stiff one. It’d give him less control, but more expression on the page.

It tickles a little, especially as she moves up his arm, closer to his armpit, and he’s having a hard time not wriggling around.

She gently nips his shoulder. “Uh huh… Yeah, staying still is _hard._ ”

He laughs at that, and looks over to see what she’s doing. He can’t tell by feel. Just long wet strokes up the inside and outside of his arm.

It’s an organic shape, curving and flowing across his skin. A vine of black ink creeping toward his shoulder. And while his calligraphy has a supple fluidity to it, it’s very obviously the creation of the hand of man. This could have grown along his arm. A statue, hand out, slowly being reclaimed by the plants around it.

He absolutely adores it. “I’m never putting a shirt on again.”

She laughs at that. “You’d distract your men.”

“Probably.” He grins up at her. “It certainly distracted you that first time.”

She rolls her eyes, kisses his left nipple, and then shifts around, so her hip is next to his shoulder, and starts to work her way down his arm. She makes a little half-sigh, half-exasperated sound, and then presses her toes against his palm. “You are huge.”

He laughs at that, too, also realizing his arm is a centimeter or two longer than her leg.

He drifts through her doing the lower half of his arm. Soft, wet touches, the dry heat of her breath, occasional bits of conversation, mostly though he’s just feeling… both the physical of his body, and the contentment in his head. 

She kisses the tip of his middle finger, and says “Done.”

He holds his arm up, and gazes at black vines tracing from his chest to his nail on his right middle finger. “It’s beautiful.”

He’s not entirely dry yet, so she doesn’t touch, but she’s looking, eyes hot, at his arm and the words he’s covered her with. “It feels good. Seeing you with my marks on you.”

He half smiles, sitting up, wrapping his legs around her kneeling body. “You see that every time you look at my face.”

She strokes the scar. “Maybe I want to mark you without pain, or anger, or rage.”

“I’d like that. Wear you on my skin every day.” He strokes his words on her skin, now dry. “Do you… Is…” He’s not sure how to form the question in his mind.

“Yes.” But she feels it, that he wants some claim on her, something tangible, visible. “I liked… having the desk clerk see us together, and the shop keepers, and walking with your arm around me, and… just… being married.”

He leans in and kisses her. “Me, too. You know there are people who do this every day?”

“Us?”

“We’ve got a ship and 200,000 credits in currency. We could leave here and start over… be… anything.”

They both hold that idea for a moment, knowing it’s not going anywhere. Amidala, Padme… they’re just sounds to blur reality for a bit, a way to shift scrutiny and give them space to enjoy being with each other.

Ren. That’s reality. Her fingers trace over Kylo and Lady Ren. His eyes follow them.

Burn his black, shred her tans, shed the skin of gray holding them together, and join together in color… It’s not going to happen, but for a moment… it’s a golden idea, and for a moment, they share it, and then drop it.

“Did Finn and Rose do something to mark being married?” he asks, going back to the main idea.

Rey shakes her head. “Not really. Not physically. He added her name, and she’s pregnant, but, that’s not what you mean, or at least that’s not what I’m thinking.”

“No.” He strokes the black ink on their skins. “Something more like this.” He touches the Maji token, on his throat today. “Or this.”

“Did your parents have anything?”

“If they did, I don’t remember it.” He thinks back, trying to remember married people. He knows it’s a thing. Knows it happens. Knows that if he or she had had anything even remotely approaching a normal life, they’d both know scores of married people, but normal life was stolen from him before he was born, and from her shortly after.

“Lando… He and Annilie… They gave each other rings at their wedding. It was a tradition from her home world. They both wore them… as best I know… for the rest of their lives.”

Rey rests her hand against his. “I could wear a ring.”

He smiles at that. “So could I.” Then he kisses her, soft, easy, playful. There’s heat there, hiding behind playful, and after this morning, after painting each other, it only takes a moment or two for the heat to overtake playful.

She twines her fingers in his hair, pulling him closer to her, straddling his legs.

He nudges her up a little, so she’s kneeling above him. His hands find her bosom, squeezing, softer, then harder, as his lips and tongue find her nipple. He’s careful to avoid her artwork, and more careful to get the kind of touch she likes. The soft, wet, dragging sensation, his lips and teeth just sliding across pink skin, lighting a shower of sparks across her nerves, drawing her body high and tight. 

He can feel her smile, feel her hand tightening in his hair, hear her moan.

She lifts his face to hers, scooting herself down, flush on his lap, and kisses him again. Lip to lip, her sucking on his bottom one, as his tongue flicks her top one.

She breaks the kiss. “I thought you wanted to see what was in my bag.”

He groans, a lot of skin-heating images in his mind, but that’d involve her getting up, and… “Later.” He grinds against her, and she rolls her hips against him.

He kisses her shoulder, brushing her hair out of the way, and then kisses her neck and notices…

She makes a little surprised squeak when they both hover a handful of centimeters in the air, twist a little, and then slide over a few more centimeters. “Kylo!”

He nods toward the wall. They’re in front of the mirror now. They can see each other in front of each other easily enough in any position, but now, with a quick glance to the side, they get another view. Her in his lap, arms around his shoulders, naked save for her arm wraps and his black ink. Him, sitting with his legs spread out, his hands cupping her bottom, his arm and chest covered in her black ink, flexing each time she rocks against him.

“It was too pretty not to share,” he says by way of explanation for moving them.

She kisses him, still rolling her hips, and when her lips move back she says, “A picture for one of my books.”

He grins at that. “Might have to get a camera, too.”

Her eyes go wide. “You’d…”

“Love to take pictures of this.” His hand cups her bosom again, and he lowers his face, tucking it in the crooks of her neck and shoulder. “Look at us, Rey, can you imagine how gorgeous this would be in black and white?”

 

 

She tugs his hair, lifting his head so he’s face to face with her. “Only if you don’t hide your face like you just did.”

He feels the smile spreading across his lips. He hadn’t realized that’s what he was doing, but… as soon as she said it, he knew she was right.

He spans her head with his hands, tips of his fingers resting from her temples to the nape of her neck, and looks up into her eyes. “How about this.”

She’s smiling back down at him. “Almost.” She rolls her hips again, canting them just enough, and he shifts his hips just a bit, knowing what she’s looking to do without breaking the contact of her hands on his shoulders.

His jaw clenches, and he pulls in a swift, shivering breath, but his eyes don’t close, and hers don’t, either, as she slides down on him. “There. That’s what I want a picture of. You looking at me like that.”

 

 

He nods, knowing his voice isn’t going to be solid enough to make a coherent word. 

Her lips find his again, and again, and again as their bodies’ rock against each other. Not a lot of motion between them, not this time. Soft, easy, little gestures. Her body, rising and falling slow and languid in his lap. His hips, curling a little with each stroke.

The wave between them builds slowly as afternoon slips into evening. One stroke into another and another as the light stretches and shifts, yellow to orange to dying sunset pink. It crashes down, washing both of them in tumbling, clenching pleasure, as pink bleeds into twilight gray.  

In the artificial light of the bathroom, after a long cuddle, and a short nap, they wash the ink away. Most of it flows around them, draining out of the shower, but ghosts of the marks linger on their skin, even after soap and water.


	27. Dance

4/27-28/1

 

On Naboo, in Ulinada, summer nights are long. The planet warms because it’s closer to its sun than it is in the winter, but on this part of the planet, night comes early and lasts long. Fifteen of the twenty-two hours in a day are full dark. Warm dark.

Playtime dark.

In Ulinada, as the sun sinks, the lights come out. Strings of tiny lights spread from building to building. They highlight the lines of roofs and doors. Spotlights stream up and out from the fountains. Gaslights, actual flames in glass cases, stand tall at each crossroad. Cafes and clubs open their doors, food, music, and people taking to the streets to enjoy a world lit by small, flickering flames. On the shores of both lakes, people burn bonfires, and go for late night swims and picnics on the beach.

It’s into this, that Kylo and Rey prepare to go.

For the first time.

For him, getting dressed works about the same way it always does when he’s putting Padme on. Though, enough of the ghosts of Rey’s ink is still visible on his arm that instead of grabbing his usual v-neck shirt, he finds the one with buttons. He leaves the top two buttons unbuttoned, and rolls up his sleeves, showing off the marks on his forearm and hand.

She’s smiling at that, enjoying watching him dress, as she gets her own clothing out, though she doesn’t start to dress herself.

She’s still sitting on the bed, watching him, having gotten no closer to dressed, and he’s starting to wonder why. He flicks an eyebrow at her, as he pulls up his pants.

“You’ll get distracted if you watch me.”

He smiles at that. “I really hope so.” He finishes with his pants and then pulls on his boots. She stands up, nodding at him, approving of this, and strokes his naked forearm. It’s a little thing, and it’s not like she’s never seen his arms before, but there is something erotic and… intimate, though she guesses that’s likely the wrong word. Everyone who sees them tonight will see him, but… This is the first time she’s ever seen him get ready to step out in front of other people, not covered from neck to toes.

She pulls the bag to her and says, “Pink, blue, or green?”

His eyes light up at that, and he says, “Green.”

She roots around in there for a moment, and pulls out a tidy little roll of something. It’s wrapped in thin, crinkly paper, and as she unwraps it, he watches with interest.

A little, “oooo” sound slips out of him as she pulls a pair of… he doesn’t know what they’re called. Not shorts. They are _very much_ not shorts. It’s… two triangles… maybe… that just cover her delta and a little bit of her bum, and… Gods… He’s already breathing hard and having a difficult time not unzipping his pants.

She’s smiling wide and happy at him, and removes the second bit. It’s a tube of fabric that goes around her bust, but… he doesn’t know how it does it, but somehow it sort of… pushes them up and together a bit, and he swallows hard, because he _really_ likes that. _Really_ likes all of it, and…

And her grin is even wider. She stretches onto her tiptoes and gives him a quick kiss. He’s about to pull her flush to him, grind into her, and then flop them both back down on the bed when she steps away, much too fast for his liking.

She grabs the green dress, and tosses it to him, turning her back on him. “Help me?”

He does, lowering the dress over her, saying, “You’re killing me, you know that, right?”

“Poor Kylo Ren, Master of the Order, most powerful dark Maji in the galaxy, murdered by sexy underwear.”

He laughs at that, rubbing against her. “Of all the ways to go…”

She leans back, brushing her rear against his front. “That doesn’t feel dead to me.”

He groans, running his hand through his hair, and then grips her hips, pulling her flush to him, fast, and grinds, hard, into her. He bites gently on her shoulder and says, “I’d have to be dead not to react to this.”

She wiggles against him again, and he groans once more. He bites a little harder on her shoulder, and places his hand in the center of her back, gently pressing her down toward the bed. His touch is light, getting across where he wants her, but completely aware that this sort of position can be tricky for her.

Today it’s not, she’s happy to lean her weight onto her hands, and look over her shoulder at him. She winks at him and wiggles again.

He stares at her, eyes hot, fingers tracing down her back, luxuriating in the heat of her skin under the softness of that fabric, and makes sure she watches as he pops the button on his trousers, and undoes the zip, slow, steady, eyes never wavering from hers as he pulls himself out. Then he flips her dress up, gives those… “What are these called?” he asks as his fingers trail over the satiny green fabric. And his eyes lap up the way it hugs her butt and delta.

 

 

He’s never, ever wanted to be a piece of fabric so much in his life.

“Panties.”

He nods, hooks his finger in the hem of them, letting his knuckle brush over her maomao, and then yanks them down.

Rey standing there, leaning into her hands against the bed, panties around her knees, dress up on her low back, looking back at him, makes him throb.

The ghost of _kiss_ and _nip_ are still on her skin, so he does exactly that, before standing up, getting a solid grip on his shaft, positioning himself, and sliding into her in a long, shivery, rush.

She arches back to meet him, and this time, there’s nothing slow. Fast, hard, deep, his hands curling into her hips, pulling her back onto him, her back arched, her body taking him to the root. He can feel the tingles starting in less than a minute, and forces himself to slow down, just a little, a few strokes slower, deeper, grinding his pelvis into hers, waiting a few breaths for her to catch up to him, and as soon as she does, he’s moving fast and hard again, watching their bodies sliding together, her pink glistening against his, until she clenches against him, his vision grays out around the edges, and his body tightens, spasms, spurting hard into her. 

 

 

* * *

On their second attempt at getting out of the hotel, Kylo’s in new trousers. (He didn’t quite push them far enough down before, and they’re in need of some washing.) And Rey, having gotten dressed a little faster this time, (now in the pink undies) managed to get into her clothing without getting him out of his. 

For all her musing about Kylo stepping out not covered from his chin down, it’s Rey who feels a bit nervous about to step out of a door in nothing but a little dress.

Finn and Rose’s wedding didn’t trigger this sensation, but maybe that was because she knew everyone there. Or maybe it was because she had a good, strong pair of stompy boots and knew that if need be, she could kick a bugger into next week.

But today, she’s in a light, floaty green dress, the kind of fabric that moves with her every time she steps, the hem dancing against her thighs with each step, each breeze, and light little sandals, that look nice, and keep her from being barefoot, but offer no real strength or protection.

Plus, this time, she’s leaving her staff behind, too.

Or it could be, when she was at Finn and Rose’s wedding she was wearing a borrowed dress. It was basically a costume for a nice night. But this clothing is _hers_ and it’s a sign that things about her are starting to change.

For example, maybe she is the kind of person who puts on nice clothing, and goes out to dinner, and dancing, with her _husband._

And maybe, just maybe, the feel of whisper-y fabric, and her hair soft and loose, both of them fluttering about with every warm breeze, and his hand on her back as they head out into a fire-lit night, neither of them carrying a weapon, is the kind of thing she might _like._

 

 

* * *

 

Food is easy to find, and for some reason they’re feeling more than a bit hungry. They wander, following their noses, and locate a street where every third building is selling something to eat.

The popular local treat appears to be some sort of sausage cooked over an open flame, chopped up fine, and mixed with bright sweet-sour vegetables, all wrapped up in a flatbread.

They get four of them, different types of sausages and vegetables, and share them.

Rey’s looking at the one he’s more or less inhaling, which is fine with her because she doesn’t much like it (She doesn’t know what a torble is, but would prefer they never end up in her food again.), and says, “Two years ago, I never had enough food to even think of turning something down because it didn’t taste good.”

He looks at the sausage wrap in his hand. “Two years ago, I didn’t eat anything I didn’t personally take out of the package myself, because it might be poisoned.”

They share a look, neither of them sure what to do with that. Eventually, he takes a bit of one of the sausages they haven’t tried, and offers it to her, holding it between his fingers.

She’s about to take it, see how it is, and then an idea hits. Instead of taking it with her fingers, she leans toward him and nibbles it from his hand, kissing his fingers.

Out here, in the dim of fire-lit night, they’re just a couple sitting at a table on a patio in front of a café. There are probably ten other couples just like them, at least, just to look at them, within twenty meters. No one looks, or stares, as he offers her another bite, and she kisses his palm, leaning in against him.

Two years changes a lot, and they’re both wondering where two more years will find them.

 

 

* * *

Food was easy to find… Music and dancing… Less easy.

A map, or datapad, or… maybe, asking someone for directions likely would have helped, but part of the fun of this is just wandering, going where they feel pulled. And since both of them are feeling like they’re supposed to be going to the same place, it’s easy enough to go with it.

And eventually, they hear music. _Loud_ thumping, heavy beat, _dancing_ music.

His arm is around her shoulders, and she squeezes his hand as they draw closer to it.

The only reason it’s not the seediest place either of them have ever been is because he’s been sent to plenty of seedy places over his years with Snoke and seedy was what the best place in Niima Outpost aspired to be.

It’s a dive bar on the far bank of the lake. It’s fairly clean, ish… as long as the lights are low, which they are. No one gives either of them a second look when they enter, though his order of _one_ rum and strawberry nectar (something he knows will taste good) for the two of them does get a raised eyebrow. It’s mostly strawberry juice with a splash of rum, and costs probably three times more than it should, but that bothers neither of them.

She’s a lightweight by the nature of her size, and he is by the nature of not building up any tolerance. By the second one, they’re both feeling gloriously toasted.

They do hover for a few moments, finishing the drink, staring at the dance area. People are bouncing around, flailing about in concert with the beat. They certainly look like they’re having a good time.

And Rey can feel her body responding to it. Her hips just start a little bounce to go with the beat pounding through the bar, pounding through them.

And Kylo’s not much of a dancer by nature, his body doesn’t feel any particular urge to move around because there’s loud music thrumming through the air, but it does feel an urge to follow Rey as she slides her way into the crowd, bouncing around, enjoying the beat.

 

 

* * *

This is _not_ how he learned to dance. Granted, he didn’t so much _learn_ as he danced with his mom and dad at Lando’ wedding a few times. And _once_ Luke let them have a dance at his academy, but he rapidly came to the conclusion that letting a bunch of horny adolescents who were trying to banish their passions dance with each other was a splendidly stupid idea. Kylo thinks it lasted half an hour before Luke shut it down muttering about how he wasn’t cut out for this.

Dancing with his parents is actually one of his better memories. He was seven, so big enough that for some of the dances, he’d stand in front of Leia, put his hand on her back, take her hand in his, and she showed him the steps. And he was little enough that for some of them, Han picked him up, and both of them held him as they danced with each other.

He guesses that was the best few days they ever had together. Four days, all together, in Cloud City. Chewie was there; he brought his wife, even. (Though he had the sense that after so many years apart they didn’t much like each other.) Lando was having a blast, showing off his home and his bride and the life he was building, both of them so pleased with each other and the future.

Luke didn’t come. He was working hard on the Jedi school, and sent his regrets. Kylo could feel the other adults had mixed feelings about that. A sense that they liked having Luke around, but that, especially since he got really serious about the Jedi stuff, he tended to put a damper on parties. So, they missed him, but didn’t exactly mind that he’d bowed out.

This, however, is _nothing_ like either of his previous dancing experiences. (Though, had Luke not stormed in and turned the music off while he and the rest of the Padawans were still getting over their jitters and just starting to move toward each other, it’s fairly likely the Jedi school one would have gotten here.)

This is hot and fast and everyone is close and bouncing around and touching, so much touching, all over touching, and Rey’s pulling him into it, though it’s not exactly taking a lot of coaxing to get him to go because he’s all in favor of situations where he gets to rub up against her as much as he likes.

And apparently, rub up against your partner to the beat is the name of the game here.

And he’s ready to play.

* * *

 

 

 

She’s got her hand around his wrist, leading him into the fray feeling… Just… good. More than good. Feeling like firelight flickering against water, reflected and shimmering.

Light and gold and bright and warm.

It’s hot in here, and she’s glad for the dress. She’d been a little shy about stepping out of their hotel room in it, a little shy about anyone but him seeing her like this, but right now, he’s looking at her like she’s the flame that’ll pull him through the night, like she’s the glow that gives him life…

Like he really fucking wants to _dance._

She grins up at him, backing into the crowd, knowing he’s got her back, and lets the music take over.

* * *

 

 

 

Kylo cannot follow the beat to save his life. He is perpetually landing a second or so off the rhythm of the music, and by the time he’s got each new song down, they switch to another one.

And he knows why. Same damn reason he ended up a huge bruise the first few times he went up against his training droids. The music is from a stereo system. If there were a band, if someone were playing it, he’d have no trouble because he could hook into their feel of how the music should work.

But this is just canned sound coming from a machine.

He could probably follow the crowd, but... actually they’re part of the problem. If it were just him and Rey, he’d be fine. Hell, if it were just him and Rey and maybe… oh… eight Praetorian guards, he’d still be fine, but there’s at least fifty people here, plus everyone at the bar, and that’s just too many different minds all hearing the music slightly differently, all reacting slightly differently, and it’s just _too much._  

She pulls his hand into hers, instead of the two of them just brushing against each other as they bounce out of synch against one another. (Though, honestly, he’s not minding that, either. The drag of her body, fast and close against his is _nice._ ) There’s the sweet spot. He can read the beat off of her, and maybe they aren’t still perfectly in synch with the music, he’s at least in synch with how she’s hearing it, so that’s something.

* * *

 

 

Okay, yes, he said he was a bad dancer when they were at the beach during Finn and Rose’s wedding. And she said he wouldn’t be with her. Because, well… that’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to say, and well… there wasn’t any music and they were going slow… it worked.

But… Kylo’s a bad dancer.

She doesn’t know _how_ he can be a bad dancer. The man fights like he was born for it. He moves like… actually… As she’s thinking about it he’s _not_ all that graceful when he moves. There’s _power_ in how he moves, tons of it, and he’s _really_ good with his lightsaber. He can whirl that baby around until the end of time.

But, actually, his fighting style is wild and overpowering, and not all that graceful.

He fights like the Falcon flies, hard and fast and dangerous, wild, but the wildness of someone who’s already run the odds in his head, and decided to throw the dice anyway. But the only elegance is the elegance of something extremely dangerous moving very fast.

After the second song of him going zig when she goes zag, she takes his hand in hers, and suddenly, things get a lot better.

And suddenly, she knows what part of the problem is, he’s got way too many minds all thrumming along, close and loud, and it’s clouding his focus.

* * *

 

 

He doesn’t exactly know what to do with his hands. Hips and knees and feet are okay. They bend and bounce around with the beat. Shoulders and hands… Okay, one of them has to stay on Rey, or he falls out of beat with her. The other one… Hanging limply at his side doesn’t feel right, but flailing it around like the rest of the party seems off, too.

An insult to his dignity or something.

Wrapping it around her waist is good. He likes it there. She likes it there.

The song shifts, gets a bit slower, a little deeper. She moves closer to him, his leg between hers, hers between his, and he finds that his hand on her thigh, fingers just an inch below the hem of her dress bare skin to bare skin works just _fine_ for both of them.

 

 

* * *

The third drink, and he’s suspicious this one may have had a tad more than a splash of rum in it, split between them, takes care of any concerns of where his hands may be going. As well as any concerns about following the beat.

He’s dancing with her, and that’s all the following he needs to do.

* * *

 

 

She’s flushed pink. Dancing, alcohol, good time, all of combining to make her skin rosy. Her head is back, hair wild from moving fast, and she’s laughing. He’s got both of his hands around her waist, his hips flush to hers, and is looking down at her.

He’ll remember this moment for the rest of his life.

 

 

* * *

He undid a button of his shirt because it’s hot and they’re dancing hard.

She undoes another one because… well, she could.

Neither of them knows which of them did the third.

Or the fourth.

And by that point his shirt is pretty much open, so he might as well just untuck it and undo the fifth.

And her hands are on his chest, and his are on her hips, and maybe this isn’t a dance so much as making love… well… fucking, standing up, dressed, but it’s _fun,_ and it’s not like they’re the only one’s doing it.

 

 

* * *

They’re back to front, and he’s _right_ up against her. Rey likes that just fine.

Then it gets better. It’s that little roll he does with his hips. It shouldn’t be fucking legal. She knows exactly how that feels when he’s not wearing pants and she’s not wearing a skirt and that little _roll_ followed by a longer, deeper thrust and… And he’s got his hand _almost_ , just on her delta. It’s low on her belly, teasing her with where it could be, and his other hand is tracing down the inside of her arm, to just, lightly brush against the side of her breast and…

She tilts her head back, moaning, softly, as she licks her lips.

 

 

He spins her around, strokes her face, and her lips seek his finger. She sucks it for a moment, before sliding her teeth over it, and he groans, loud, grinding against her, his thigh between her legs, and his pelvis against her hip, and really, they need to get out of this fucking bar and back to their hotel, probably ten minutes ago.

 

 

* * *

He’s feeling a little self-conscious leaving the press of dancing bodies. There, in the melee of soft touch, he was more or less covered. Out here, leaving, there’s nothing blocking anyone’s view of his body, which is standing tall and proud, happily leading the way, hoping to get somewhere private, and into Rey, as fast as it can.

Though, as he looks around a bit, he does notice he’s not the only man leaving the place in this state.

And that actually, helps.

Rey giving him a gentle squeeze along with, “Let’s put that to good use,” banishes what’s left of any self-consciousness.

After all, he is standing proud for a reason, so… it’s _appropriate._

Though he thinks it’s possible that the amount of rum drinks in his system _might_ have something to do with why he thinks this is appropriate.

 

 

 

* * *

They’re lost. Every bloody street in this bloody town looks like every other street in this bloody town and the last thing either of them wants to do is wait another second, almost running down another street, not finding their hotel on it.

Rey sees the alley, and catches his eye. His desire sparks _hot_ at the idea. He’s already ridiculously turned on from dancing and being out with her and… In public, where they could get caught… Okay, no not them, but… the idea of it is still burning through his mind.

He raises an eyebrow _Sure?_

She nods at him, pulling him into it. They’ve made it into a less seedy part of town, so it’s clean enough, and there’s no lights, so it’s not exactly easy to see into, but as he’s pulling her to him, he casts his _do not look_ , and she bumps it, adding her own layer of the Force to it.

As long as they don’t make too much noise, they shouldn’t attract much attention.

He pulls her hips to his, grinding against her, and she’s on her tiptoes, sucking his tongue like it’s the best candy ever, and the loud rip of her panties in his hands more or less kills any intentions he may have had of being quiet, but her answering flare of arousal shatters any concern he might have had about doing it.

The feel of silk shredding between his fingers, and her skin hot and wet against them has him leaking, and she’s undoing his trousers, pushing them down around his hips, and he’s pulling her up, into his arms, her legs wrapping around his hips, and a long slide and…

Both of them groan, _loud._

She bites his shoulder, muffling the sound a little.

He’d back her against the wall, but her dress doesn’t cover that much of her and the wall looks rough, so that’s not happening. There’s only so fast and deep they can go like this, but he’s remembering the way she was watching that little roll of his hips, remembering how it felt, and he can do that right here, right now, all fucking night long if she likes.

And she does. He feels the vibration of her moan though his shoulder. He turns his face to hers, kissing her cheek and ear, and she gets the message, meeting his lips with hers.

 

 

Her legs tighten on his hips, and she adds her own little roll, coaxing a groan out of him.  

They may be doing an okay job on invisible, but they’re doing a piss-poor job of silent.

But it’s too… everything… to stay quiet. Too good, too now, too intense, too… Feelings like this weren’t meant to be kept inside, shuttered behind still lips and tight jaws.

He can’t see them, but he can feel his words on her skin, and her pictures on his, and he’s murmuring it to her with each roll of their hips, “Love you, love you, love you…” And her head’s back, mouth open, soft, gasping pants punctuating his mantra.

His hands squeeze under her thighs, lifting her higher, getting more friction, making both of them louder.

“They’ve got to be around here somewhere!” freezes both of them dead and silent. There’s a constable, or something like that, searching up and down the street. He doesn’t look into the alley, their spell holds, but he’s muttering about stupid fucking kids making a racket.

Both of them breaking into a completely different set of vibrations, body shaking, _silent_ giggles adds another layer of delight of the embrace of her body around his.

When they stop laughing, they share a look, he’s asking if she wants to stop, and she rolls her hips against him again, a very clear _no._

He smiles at her, very happy with that response, and kisses her deep and wet, rocking his hips back against hers, building their fire up again.

This time he’s thinking it, letting it burst out of him in feelings, if not words, _Love you, love you, love you…_

She’s rocking back against him, meeting him stroke for stroke, hands in his hair, eyes on his, _Love you, Kylo, love you._

He stiffens at it, his hips snapping, faster, harder, taking them higher. Maybe there will be a point where her using his name won’t get to him, but right now… every time she does, especially in moments like now, where she makes it clear she’s chosen _him…_ It just _thrills_ him.

She leans back, taking him deeper, taking them higher, again and again…

Their rhythm goes choppy, staccato, deeper, faster, seeking release.

There… right… there… It’s a hard, shuddering thrust, and a deep grind of pelvis to pelvis, and they’re both gone, tingling from head to toes, shaking with the force of it.

She clings, limp and breathing hard, against him for a few moments. He’s panting, breath and heart slowing down, head against her shoulder.

When he puts her down, they realize that ripped panties don’t exactly go far when it comes to cleaning up, and there’s not a towel for… kilometers. At least not one they can get.

He takes his shirt the rest of the way off, and hands it to her, figuring their _do not look_ will extend to him wandering around without a shirt.

She giggles at it, takes the ruined panties off, tidies herself up, and tucks as much of the shirt as will fit into his back pocket.

He wraps his arm around her shoulders, and they start back to their hotel, a much slower, more relaxed pace, this time.

As they’re ambling along, she takes his right hand in hers, and kisses his palm. “I like this.”

“Walking around with me half-naked and covered in your marks?”

“Yes.”

He grins at her, feeling just wonderfully wicked and playful. “Walking around half-naked and covered in my…” he licks his lips, looks her up and down, and she feels the word he’s thinking, it’s a naughty one, and it’s not the one he says, “mark?”

She bops him with her hip, and snuggles her head against his shoulder. “Yes.”

He slips his arm around her shoulders, and kisses the top of her head. “Good.”

 

 

 

* * *

Everyone loves a good bit of gossip, and Naboo is no exception to that rule. The cheap, flimsy scandal sheet that claims to have pictures of the Master of the Order dancing in a bar with some floozy sells like mad for a few days.

And, the pictures… sort of… maybe… kind of look like him. Someone was getting pictures of himself and his date, and caught the “Master” in the back of his photos, and sold the video to the scandal sheet. It’s definitely a large man with black hair, dark eyes, and a scar across his face. The focus is blurry, and the clothing is utterly un-commanding, and the body art is… peculiar, plus the expression on his face couldn’t be less Master Ren if he tried and… It’s a cheap, shitty bar with bad drinks and lame music, and... He’s a kind of spastic dancer.

Which, for the people who think it is Master Ren, just makes the story all the better. But, most of the readers just think it’s a couple in love, with a somewhat goofy, probably drunk, guy trying to impress his date with some tragically bad dance moves.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I had a lot of fun with this chapter. And, a lot of fun means I made some art that didn't really have a home. Because, you know, if you've got a good pose, you should really shoot it in nine different lighting schemes and at least six angles. ; )
> 
> So, I made a home for the art that didn't have a home.
> 
> I've got a new art/musings/Keryl Raist fiction blog, and if you'd like to see the shots that didn't make it into the story, they're here: https://kerylraist.wordpress.com/2018/06/10/sometimes-its-just-too-pretty-not-to-render/
> 
> Oh, and if any of you are curious about my inspiration for Kylo Ren being a kind of goofy dancer, the post you're looking for is here:
> 
> http://pixelrey.tumblr.com/post/170106102175/adam-driver-dancing-requested-by


	28. Lady Vader/Lady Ren

4/28/1

 

Kylo’s not a stranger to pain. He’s felt more versions of it in any given year than most people do in a lifetime. That said, waking up with his head throbbing, the room spinning, and his stomach violently attempting to go galloping out of his body is an entirely new flavor of pain, and he’d really like to never, ever feel this again.

He does make it to the bathroom (though he trips over his own feet on the way) before he starts to retch.

A second later, Rey’s behind him, stroking his back and shoulders, and her touch, along with her calming, healing light side Force eases the rolling in his stomach and the thudding in his head.

He gingerly stands up, swishes out his mouth with water, and then _carefully_ sits on the bathmat with his back against the tub. “Thank you.”

“What was that? Did you get poisoned or something?”

He winces; her voice is not exactly a gentle or dulcet tone right this second. He slowly lowers himself to his side, and rests his head on her thigh, putting her hand back on his head, and says, quietly, “Yes. Your light is taking care of you. My dark doesn’t lend itself to automatic hangover cures.”

 

 

She gently pets his hair, and as she’s doing that, he feels the all over muck of… Force… Okay, he can remember at least five of those drinks, and they did split them, and the first few didn’t seem to pack any punch, but after that… He’s thinking more and coming to the conclusion that she wasn’t really drinking them after the third one, and that just possibly he may have ordered a sixth one that he had all to himself and…

Wincing, he says, “This is why I don’t drink.”

She kisses his temple, and he feels another wave of her magic easing through him. “Better?”

“Getting there.” And he is. He’s not immediately hoping someone will shoot him to put him out of his misery.

She gently strokes his forehead, brushing his hair back, and looks around. She can’t see a chronometer, but its morning, it has to be, though the light it still gray and dim. She kisses his temple again. “First full day together.”

He gently squeezes her thigh and gives it a little kiss, before trying to see if he can muster any of his own Force skills to help his body feel better faster.

“This is not how I was intending to start it.”

 

 

* * *

Later than either of them anticipated, they’re packed up and on the move.

Next stop, Theed, where, hopefully, the Great Library has a book or two about a certain former Queen of Naboo.

And, maybe, someone knows a place where one could locate rings.

 

 

* * *

Ulinada is, all things considered, a fairly small place. About 50,000 people live there full time, and another twenty-or-so-thousand tourists are there at any given time. On the scale of places Rey’s been, it’s mammoth, but, really, it’s a small city between two lakes that people like to go to to get away from a real city.

Theed is just such a ‘real’ city.

It’s the human capital of Naboo, and the largest above ground settlement. Sixteen million people call it home, and other than a soul deep aversion to being anywhere with this many people for any long bit of time, Rey can see why.

It’s the most beautiful place she’s ever imagined.

They take two passes over it, before getting cleared to land, which is more than enough time to see the elegant domes, in all shades of copper, from turquoise patina to screaming new orange. The buildings under them all seem to be made of the same pastel coral stone, and all of it stretches out along a cliff blessed with tumbling waterfalls at the edge of a wide green plain.

“Why would Palpatine ever leave?”

Kylo shrugs.

“Everything you could want is here. It’s beautiful!”

He smiles a little at that. He’s piloting, so both of his hands are busy right now. He cocks his head a little, a _touch me, here_ sort of gesture. She rests her hand against his cheek, and he lets her feel his dark and the niggly voices that live there.

She does, sensing that gnawing _need_ for _more._

“Not everyone has enough light to smother that voice. I doubt he ever had a day of his life where he was content.”

She strokes his cheek. “Have you?”

He half-shrugs at that, too, looking like he’s focusing on bringing the craft down in their allotted space. He’s certainly had moments, maybe even stretching into complete hours when he’s been content; he’s not sure about an entire day, though. So he focuses on landing the ship, though they both know he doesn’t need to concentrate that hard on landing the craft.  “It’s better than it used to be.” He shrugs at that, too. “I’m building and securing right now. A lot to keep myself occupied and feed that need. If I’m ever really secure… I don’t know how it’ll work.” He’s intensely watching the spot they’re going to land, intentionally not meeting her eyes, “He kept the Empire stable for a good seventeen-eighteen years, maybe he was just biding his time, waiting for the Death Star to get finished. He was patient enough for something like that. Or maybe he hit the point where the challenge was getting stale, so he started to blow things up to make himself feel alive.”

She kisses his cheek, feeling how scared he is that that’s the path he’s standing on.

 

 

* * *

They’ve got two hours before they can check into their hotel, so the library is their first stop. It’s a temple to information, soft peach stone rising up before them, capped off with a pastel greeny-blue dome, high, wide windows in violet and gray stained glass, and huge beaten copper doors.

Rey hadn’t been entirely sure about Ulinada, but this, _this_ she likes.

He can feel her appreciating the feel of the place. “Maybe it’s a Jedi thing. Luke loved this sort of look. His temple was built like this, smaller scale, not as expensive, but, arches, domes, big windows… He’d have been happy here.”

The doors open for them, sliding back, allowing them entry. “He may have been born here.” Rey rolls her eyes. “For all I know, I was, too.”

Kylo shakes his head. “You don’t have the accent for it. Whoever taught you to speak was from a core-world.” They walk through an open, empty area, floors gleaming white marble, sofas and tables with people reading, and a main desk in the center with several people, very quietly, talking to a few others.

“Doesn’t mean I wasn’t born here.”

He inclines his head, about to respond, but they both feel the Librarian glaring at them. Apparently, this is a place of _silence._ No one else is talking in their normal voice, and… as they look around, it’s fairly clear they’re also not dressed like the locals.

Rey’d moved up to the local dress for Ulinada, deciding that since they were still on vacation, she could keep wearing her fun, little dresses, but apparently that’s freakishly casual by the standards of Theed, or, at least, it’s library. Kylo’s still in his Padme clothing, which is vastly more casual than his blacks, which are about a thousand times less ornate than the robes the men around them are wearing. Everyone around them is covered from head to toe in expensive, ornate, jewel-bedecked outfits of splendorous wealth.

She glances up at him and thinks, _Poe said they were kind of stuffy here._

Kylo bites back a quick laugh.

The glare intensifies. Not only are they not dressed for it, but apparently this isn’t a place where people _laugh._

_Looks like your pilot was right about that. I haven’t been glared at this hard for stepping over the line since I was eight._

_What did you do?_

_Mis-remembered my nine times tables._

She nods. _Tragic._

_Pretty much._

They’ve made it to the main desk, and Rey decides that this is a job better handled by her than Kylo. “Excuse me, we were wondering where books on the Queens of Naboo would be?”

The Librarian, an older woman, in rich brocades and the most elaborate hairdo Rey’s ever seen, eyes both of them, making it clear they don’t really belong here, but she’ll deign to help them, probably because she approves of what they wish to learn more about, and then gestures behind her. “Nine rows back, seven down.” Her voice is hushed, and Rey wonders if she’s ever spoken at full volume.

“Thank you.”

 

 

* * *

They’ve found the right set of shelves. He’s scanning book titles, and she’s supposed to be scanning them, but really she’s watching him, crouched down, reading through one of the lower shelves.

His hair is pulled back in a tidy knot. He’s left the leather jacket back in their ship; it’s too warm for it. His lightsaber is back at the ship, too. He’s in a simple white v-neck shirt, dark blue trousers, and brown boots. There are still the faint ghosts of her marks on his right arm as his fingers glide from book to book.

Maybe there never was a Ben, but she’s got the sense that this is what he was supposed to look like.

 _Tan. Lots of tan._ He thinks at her without stopping looking at the books.

She smirks at that. She sits next to him, cross-legged, and rests her head against his shoulder. _Was Ben supposed to be a scholar?_

He shrugs. _He was supposed to know things. Be deep and wise. Not sure if anyone ever took the time to think about how Ben was supposed to get that information. Or how ridiculous it is to expect a twenty-year-old who’d never been anywhere other than his home or a school, never met more than fifty people, to be_ wise.

_Did you do a lot of this with Luke?_

_We only had a few hundred books. I read them all the first three years._

Rey tries to imagine ever saying _only_ to go along with a few _hundred_ books. Even with Orlac’s library in her possession, the idea of a few hundred books still feels like _more_ than she’d ever imagined. _Did you like reading?_

He sits back, back against the stack behind them, and pulls a book toward them. It’s not the _right_ one, just the first one that caught his attention. He cradles it between his hands, and gets comfy. _Ben would have happily spent_ ages _here, or with his calligraphy brushes._  

_If the little voice that wanted more didn’t keep calling to you?_

He inclines his head at that, and kisses the top of her head. _Maybe._ He sighs and looks around. _No books for you?_

 _No._ She looks around. That’s not strictly true. _Well, not like these. Technical specs. Instruction manuals. Scavengers grab whatever might be valuable, and if you know how things work, you can make them more valuable. So… you raid a downed Star Destroyer, and if you can find not just the power couplings, but the specs for them, too, it’s worth more. If you keep the specs, you can fix the next coupling you find, and that’s worth even more. I’m sure I saw books like this; there were personal quarters, and I raided them for clothing and bedding and whatnot, but books didn’t fetch anything of value, so I never brought them back. They weren’t worth the sweat._

He kisses the top of her head again. _Books were a way for me to have more, without having to deal with my failings and flaws. In a story, you’re whoever the story is about, and even Luke’s library had stories. Jedi heroes of old. Men and women who were effortlessly calm and centered, capable of finding their peace, always using their power the right way. Warriors who ferreted out the dark, inside themselves and outside, too, and destroyed it._ He doesn’t say it to her, or put the thought to words, but there’s a reason why the first thing he burned at Luke’s Temple was the library.

She gives him a little hug.

 _The heroes didn’t scare their classmates when they got frustrated because all of the ‘good’, ‘light’ things didn’t come easy to them._ He rests his cheek against the top of her head. _Did you ever want_ more _?_

She sighs a little. _I wanted my parents to come back. I wanted it to be a mistake. I wanted enough food to eat and to feel safe at night and… I’d tell myself stories, that they were great, important people, people who were in grave danger, and they’d dropped me in Jakku to keep me safe, because no one would ever look for me there, but they’d come back for me. I couldn’t leave because they’d come for me, sooner or later, and if I wasn’t there, then we’d never be together again, and never go on to do the great things we were meant to._

He rubs his cheek against the top of her head again. _They were great, important people. And there was real danger. Every other week someone new was trying to kill one of them. And they were trying to keep me safe, from their enemies, from the monster in my head, and the monster they were afraid I’d become._ He kisses the top of her head. _And it didn’t_ fucking matter _at all. Even Darth Vader seems great, if he actually gives a damn and pays attention to you and tells you you’re good enough and meant for something important._

 

 

She rests against him, and he rests against her, and for a moment, they just both feel it.

Then he reaches up, and puts the book back. _Come on, let’s find the right one, and go to our hotel._

 

 

* * *

“Think this is it?” he says, looking at a title a few moments later, speaking in a quiet whisper.

“The Queens of Naboo: Padme Naberrie Amidala… I think that’s it. How long is it?”

He flips through the actual pages. “Three hundred pages. So… Most of the rest of today.”

“Think they’ll let us take it?” There are signs about how to get a library card, but they don’t actually live in Theed so…

He flashes her an _are you kidding me_ look.

“Oh.”

He nods. “Maybe not _let,_ but we’ll make sure they get it back, okay?”

She smirks a little. “Okay.”

 

 

* * *

There’s nothing old-fashioned or quaint about this hotel. It’s about ten minutes past modern and as slick and comfortable as the capitol city of a capitol world could make its top-ranked accommodations for honored guests.

In fact, it’s so high ranked, and so comfortable, and lush, and rich, and plush, that the desk clerk spends a good five minutes ignoring them because they aren’t dressed like the usual high-muckety-mucks who go to places like this.

Kylo’s staring at the man, thinking about what’d he do if he showed up in his full blacks and gave him this exact same gaze, and Rey is holding his hand making it very clear that she’d really appreciate him not choking the jerk.

 _He’d wet his pants if I used my real name._ He can feel she’s vaguely amused by that idea, and there’s a tiny little spark in the back of her mind that wants to see him try it, but the “better” part of her nature jumps on that and pushes it down.

_No._

She whacks the tip of her staff against the counter. Not a hard hit, but enough force to make a loud crack. The desk clerk jerks at it, finally deigning to notice them.

“Yes?”

“Seven minutes it a long time to wait when you’re doing nothing else,” Kylo says.

“We’re booked.”

“Lovely. We have a reservation.” Rey replies, “Amidala. Ben and Rey.”

That startles the desk clerk more than the crack. He looks from Kylo to Rey and back again. His eyes linger on Rey, really looking at her, not sure if he’s seeing a ghost or not. He eyes their clothing. They’re either not rich and powerful enough to be here, or so rich and powerful they don’t care if they blend or not.

And with that name… “What brings you to the Theed?”

“Learning more about my grandmother,” Kylo says. “She lived here. Died here about fifty-five years ago. You’ve probably heard of her.” He puts a hint of the threat he could put into that sentence, not wanting to annoy Rey, too badly, but not wanting to just let that twit just be.

The desk clerk swallows, hard. His eyes skitter down to his register, which is completely digital. “Amidalas, Ben and Rey, yes, we have you on the list.” He ducks behind the counter and comes up with two key cards that he runs through the register. “Room 1687. Do you need help with your bags?”

Rey glances at the one bag over Kylo’s shoulder, and the one bag she’s carrying. “I think we’re fine. All we needed was someone to pay attention.”

“Ah… yes…”

 

 

* * *

“So…” Rey asks when they get into their room, and put their bags down.

He’s already digging out the book. “Reading?”

“Sure. Food, too.” She’s hungry.

He looks around the room and eventually finds what he expects. A menu. “I can’t be the only person who has food brought to him.” He tosses it to her, and then flops onto the bed, ready to start reading.

“Do you want to eat?”

His stomach’s still a bit off, but it’s been hours since he had a piece of dry toast and a cup of tea for breakfast, so food is probably a good idea, even if he’s not feeling enthusiastic about it. “Yes, but I don’t much care what. Something bland. I want to get into this.”

“Okay.” She figures out what to get and places the order, as he pulls off his boots, and takes off his belt.

She smiles a bit at that, deciding they likely should keep their clothing on until the food gets here, but… as soon as it’s here, off it’s going. A lazy afternoon nibbling, reading, resting, and just laying around with each other sounds awfully good to her.

 

 

* * *

Rey’s listening to him read. It’s interesting, and she’s enjoying this history of Amidala. She sounds like the kind of lady Rey’d like to meet. And though the prose is precise and passionless, she’s getting hints of Kylo through Amidala, or maybe seeing shadows of her through him, bits of stubbornness and attachment to shaping the world the way she wanted it.

How she ended up with Vader… or Anakin… that’s still a mystery. As of this point in the story, she’s just been elected Queen. Rey knows some people fall in love young, and she supposes that might be what happened, that fourteen-year-old Padme met fifteen-year-old Anakin, still on the light side… or something like that.

But that doesn’t work. Luke and Leia were born more than a decade from where they are in the history.

Doesn’t mean she didn’t just meet a young Jedi. After all, that likely wouldn’t be in the official history. And, as he keeps reading, they eventually hit the point where she’s coming into contact with the Jedi, but… neither of them know who Qui Gon Jinn is. She makes a note to go look him up, see if there’s anything interesting about him, but later.

She’s laying on her side. Kylo’s on his stomach, pillows propped under his chest, book in front of him, reading away. His voice is soft and low, and she watches his eyes skittering across the page, feels him gravitating to another line of family.

She kisses his shoulder, feeling his ties to Vader, to the idea of welcoming dark, and enjoys how rapidly he’s sinking into Padme’s light.

He’s all spread out, taking up even more of the bed than he seems like he should. He’s big to begin with, but something about a bed and a good book makes him seem to melt to expand and cover the whole thing.

 

 

She lays a finger on his shoulder, tracing lines between his freckles and moles, brushing his hair to the side to connect the one from the top of his shoulder to the one just below the nape of his neck. He’s got a lot of them on his face, and not so many on the rest of him. Still enough of them to draw pretty patterns on his back and hips, though.

She gets up, finding his brush and ink. He looks up from the book, sees what she’s doing, and smiles, and goes back to reading to them.

He’s going back to the Order covered in little ink drawings, and both of them like it.

He purrs a little, stopping mid-sentence as the brush traces over his back. She’s not sure what she’s drawing, there’s no conscious intention there, but eventually, she can see the design starting to come together.

She kisses, gently, above it, making sure not to smear it, then finishes it off, and sends the brush and ink back to the top of the dresser.

He looks over his shoulder to the mirror behind him, and says, “A…” he stares at it, not sure what it might be. “That’s not a bird, right?”

“It’s a moth.” She blows on it gently, and tests, rubbing her finger over one of the lines. It’s dry.

“Oh.”

She wonders if Anakin was like his grandson, a moth. A dark creature that loves the light.

“Moths get burned by the light,” Kylo says, turning his face away from the book, toward her, followed by, “You’re thinking loudly.”

She gently touches the scar that marks where she stabbed a lightsaber through his shoulder. “Do you think you didn’t get burned?”

“I didn’t die.”

She kisses that scar. “True.”

He rolls over, onto his back, and stretches his arms above his head, somehow taking up _more_ of the bed. “What light creatures love the dark?”

She shrugs at that, snuggling into him, resting her face against his chest, feeling/hearing the thrum of his heart. Then she thinks back to some of the artwork she saw at Orlac’s school. “Girls. Human girls.”

He laughs at that, petting her hair. “I think you’re onto something. Do they get burned?”

She thinks about how Padme Amidala, youngest queen of Naboo, with her bright, bright future, and glorious reign ended up. “Probably.” That’s grim, and closer to them than either of them finds comfortable.

His hand strokes down her head and back, fingers trailing over her spine. He’s not sure if this is real, if it’s a memory, or a feeling, or him just… hoping, but he says, “I don’t think she knew she was getting a dark creature. I think she fell for Anakin, good, light, Jedi Anakin. She didn’t know what was under there. Maybe he didn’t, either.”

She kisses his chest, and lays her hand over his heart.

He kisses the top of her head. “And you saw me on my worst day, at my darkest hour, and walked into the dark, eyes open, knowing what was there, and took it up anyway. I think that makes a lot of difference.”

  

 

* * *

She takes over reading. She’s sitting, back against the headboard, and he lays in the bed, head on her thigh, listening.

From Qui Gon Jinn, they find a familiar name, Obi Wan Kenobi. Apparently he and Amidala worked together on several missions over the years, and he was her personal security for a while.

There’s even a picture of the two of them. It’s the only picture in the book where Amidala’s wearing no makeup. The only one where they’ve got any sense of her actual face, instead of a mask of white and red. They spend quite a while looking at it, and… Rey can somewhat see the idea that Kylo has her eyes. They’ve both got dark brown eyes, though the shapes are quite different. The rest of him though, that’s all his own.

She can understand why the clerk kept looking from him to her. She’s got more of Padme’s looks than her grandson does. She doesn’t know how last names move among the Naboon, if they’re patrilineal or matrilineal, but for a few heartbeats he was wondering which one of the two of them had the name first.

And for as much as Kylo’s looking at her, he’s also studying the man next to her. _Ben._ His namesake. Eventually, he closes his eyes and looks away from it. Then he says, “That’s what Ben was supposed to look like. Tan and brown, a blue lightsaber, deep and calm. The kind of man you trust to protect a queen. The kind of man who shows up to rescue a princess…” He shakes his head at that, too. “She never met him, you know? Saw him for about a minute. Watched him die at Vader’s hands, but… He was a friend of her father, and Luke… He was General Kenobi to her, a figure from history, not part of her life. He was Ben to Luke, and Luke really only knew him for two days.”

She strokes his hair, waits to see if he says anything else, but he doesn’t, so she turns the page, and keeps reading. 

There’s no mention of Anakin Skywalker, and when they get to the end of the chapter the book veers off to talk about intra-Naboon squabbling between the humans and Gungans.

After a few pages of that, Kylo says, “He was Kenobi’s apprentice, so… that must be how they met.”

He tries to feel back, through the memories of his bloodline, but… there’s nothing.

And then it’s there. It’s an avalanche of anger at Kenobi and Padme, hard enough he jerks at it.

“Kylo?” Rey’s really disturbed, dropping the book, and grabbing his shoulders.

He’s choking on how hot this hate is. His hand is clenching, hard, crushing a throat that isn’t there, and the desire to strike out at _everything_ is overwhelming. It’s hate, rage, on a level he’s never felt before. He didn’t think this kind of emotional fire even existed, let alone could be survived.

And then it’s gone, and Rey’s looking exhausted.

They’re both breathing hard, him from the onslaught of the emotions, and her from cutting him off from them. Both of them take a moment to regroup themselves.

Eventually he can sort through the feelings enough to figure out what they were. “Everything was on fire. Hot… Glowing red. All over hot. The last time he saw her, she was with Kenobi… He thought they’d both betrayed him, personally, politically, romantically... His best friend… mentor…” neither of those words feel right, “brother and his wife were fucking each other and had just came to kill him.” His head is throbbing from how hard that memory hit. “He choked her to her second to last breath and fought Kenobi to what was supposed to be the death. Kenobi was better with a lightsaber, and he won the fight, otherwise they all would have died there. Her, him, Luke and Leia. If he’d won, he’d have ended himself, too. The whole of them would have vanished in flames.”

She takes a few, deep, calming breaths, just touching that anger left her shaking. Then she strokes him again, feeling the ache through him, too. “He turned when he met Luke. When he really felt that…”

Kylo nods. “That whatever happened with Padme, it didn’t involve Kenobi. She’d been true to him. On that level, at least.” He can’t really see it. Just feel the echoes of it, but… that was enough.

 

 

* * *

The last chapters of Padme’s life are… politics. Lots and lots and lots of politics. Padme put everything she could, and then some, into making sure that Palpatine never became Emperor.

And she failed.

Palpatine out-maneuvered her and the Jedi, and the senate, and… And everyone who didn’t directly benefit from him taking over.

Her last chapter it vague. There’s no mention of her being pregnant. The author isn’t entirely sure when she died, or how, just that it happened around the time of the Jedi purge.

There was a full, state funeral. The Naboon offer their dead back to the rivers that gave them life. Cremate them, and return their ashes to the water, but even that isn’t certain for Padme Amidala. On the orders of the new Emperor, within days of her death, construction on a mausoleum began. It was finished within a year, and there are pictures of a beautiful, solemn place. The author of the book doesn’t know if it was just a memorial, or if her body was, contra their traditions, interred there.

Rey’s voice goes quiet as she finishes reading that, and Kylo’s looking out the window of their rooms, a thoughtful expression on his face. It’s fairly late. The sun is long past set, but after finishing that story, he’s not exactly tired, and she’s not, either.

He glances away from the reflection of their room in the windows, and says, “Would you mind going with me?”

She shakes her head. “Let’s get dressed and go.”

 

 

* * *

It takes them a while to find it. It’s not exactly a tourist destination, and this late at night, there aren’t too many people to ask for directions. So, they likely don’t take the most direct route, but Kylo’s feeling pulled to his grandmother, and eventually they find her mausoleum.

During the day, it’s likely solemn and pretty.

At night it’s beautiful and haunting. Two eternal flames burn at the head and foot of a sarcophagus graced with the symbol of the royal house of Naboo, lighting a small gray chamber with a shifting, orange-yellow glow.

Before them, a stained glass window glows from the streetlights and moon behind it. Adding a purple/blue shift to the light.

They both have the feeling that no one, save them, has set foot here for years, maybe decades. Though, since there’s no dust, someone has to come, at least to clean.

 

 

* * *

Most children grow up with two grandmothers. Technically speaking, Kylo had three, though growing up, he’d only known of Breha Organa. Both his mother and father’s birth mothers’ were question marks.

Leia was adopted. He knew that. She and Uncle Luke had been born, raised apart, and were thrown back together by the Force nineteen years later.

Leia, with that little ironic look in her eyes, would say that the day she lost everything in the world that mattered to her, her home, her family, her sense of purpose, the Force saw her despair and gave her a new family.

Literally. “It was less than five hours later. I’d been in the cell, wallowing in…” He could feel the pain there, real pain, heart-deep pain, constant, motivating, shaping pain, but she didn’t like to ever acknowledge that. Pain, that was part of the dark, so people died, loves were lost, the world stopped turning, literally, halted on its axis and shattered to a billion pieces, and she kept it covered with sarcasm and a little bit of genuine humor, “it, and then in walks this guy pretending to be a Stormtrooper, badly, and he whips off his helmet, and says, ‘I’m Luke Skywalker, I’m here to rescue you.’ It took us a while to figure out he was your Uncle Luke, but we did, and the pieces slid back into place.”

He didn’t think to ask why she’d been adopted, and she never brought it up.

He wonders if that was part of her staying away, keep her past from slipping out. Not like it finally did slip out, rumors and gossip spread wide across the galaxy, (Though by then he already knew the real name, or at least what it claimed was the real name, of the voice that came to visit in his dark.) but how it too easily could have slipped out, her just thinking too hard about it. He could have pulled an image or feeling from her.

He often did.

He doesn’t think she ever knew her mother’s name. He’s not sure if she ever wondered who would have made babies with Vader. Then a bit of life slots into his head, something his mother likely understood, but, even with Rey in his life, wasn’t anything that he’d ever considered: Women don’t always consent.

There’s nothing in the book suggesting she ever fell in love. Not with Anakin, not with Obi Wan, not with anyone, ever.

And there’s nothing, anywhere, to ever suggest that Vader would have cared if a woman consented or not.

Kylo had been so lonely, so longing for _anyone_ to approve of him, take an interest, encourage him to just _be,_ that it never occurred to him to wonder about Vader’s lady. Obviously, if Vader was his grandfather, there had to be a _grandmother_ , but… He gently touches Rey’s wrist. It wasn’t until he had an actual grasp on love and sex and how children get made, beyond a barely theoretical understanding of the technical details, that the idea that there had to be more than just _Vader_ ever occurred to him.

He looks at Rey, who’s quietly feeling this space, looking at the stained glass and the mausoleum, and wonders about Anakin and Padme. Did she see her dark knight and fall in love with him? Was the taste of danger sweet between her lips?

Did he see her light, feel it warm him, get burned, and in turn burn everything he touched?

Did he just _take_ what he wanted? Did he ever bother to care about her?

Did she join Kenobi to take him down as an act of revenge?

No… maybe… no… _Wife_. He felt that. _Brother…_ Vader… Anakin… had words for them. That was there, solid, real… If anyone in the universe mattered to him, it was Padme and Kenobi. It wouldn’t have hurt that much if she’d just been a warm body offering a moment of release or if he’d just been a teacher.

His eyes slide shut and he feels that last moment, walls in place so it won’t hit so hard, but… It’s there, from both sides this time. The boiling rage and hate, that’s Vader, and under it, to the side, sorrow… such abysmal sorrow. That’s Padme. She loved him, and stood there, watching him lay waste to every hope they’d ever had. And when he was done, when he’d betrayed her, them, their children, and the light, the weight of breathing became too heavy, and she let her light go.

He lays his hand on the cold stone of an ornate sarcophagus with the symbol of the royal house of Naboo on it. There are echoes here, memories… He can feel the pressure of the stone against his palm, but not the _feel_ of it. But a prosthetic limb would only feel the pressure. Texture, smooth, hard, silky, those sensations are denied neural networks made of synthnerves.

“Vader was here, at least once.”

“To gloat or cry?” Rey asks.

Kylo slides back, through his bloodlines, feeling wary, afraid that he may want to jerk out of this, fast.

He feels Rey’s hand on his wrist. She looks up at him, eyes warm. “I’ve got you. Go feel it.”

His eyes slide half-shut, and he pulls the memories from around him. The image is very clear, the man covered in black armor, breathing labored, chest full of cobwebs and acid, kneeling here, mask pressed to the stone. “Cry. It wasn’t until he met Luke that he knew he didn’t kill Padme and their children. He never recognized Leia, never felt her. Only knew she existed for a few moments, and never knew it was _her._ ”

Rey touches the sarcophagus. “Did he love her?”

“As much as he could. For whatever that was worth.” He looks around, half expecting the blue glow of the past made alive again, but nothing with voice deigns to visit them, or disturb this place.

 

 

* * *

“Why didn’t you kill me?” she asks in the dark of their room.

They don’t, haven’t talked about the fight in Snoke’s throne room. Around it, on occasion, but not _about_ it. Somehow… It feels like too much happened to possibly fit into words. But he can more than understand her thinking about that right now.

He is, too. He answers her question with one of his own. “When we touched hands, the first time, what did you see? You said you knew I’d turn, but…”

She’s on her side, wrapped in his arms, the top of her head tucked under his chin, and her back to his chest. He can’t see her expression, but he can feel it. She doesn’t mind him taking the conversation here, knowing its part of getting to where she wants to go.

She thinks back on it, and he can feel her calling that flash of a future, though he doesn’t get a glimpse of it. Whatever it is, the Force has decided it’s for her, and if she wishes to share it, she can, but it won’t let him just see it.

“There’s no real detail. It’s not a picture, more a feeling. Or… sounds maybe… Like reading the story. You don’t literally see the pictures in your mind, there’s no concrete image, but you still _see_ it, right?”

He understands that.

“We were building something, together.”

“Like your cottage?”

“Like it, but not it. There were children with us.”

“Ours?”

“I don’t think so. Some of the Maji. It was bright, and sunny. That was clear. Sunshine. You and I and sunlight. And I knew we had to get off the _Supremacy_ for that to ever happen, so…” She doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then finishes with, “And I knew that if I didn’t leave, we’d never get off that ship. I could feel it when you offered me your hand, that glimpse of the future was dying in front of me as you begged me to stay.”

“I didn’t beg.”

She laughs at that. “Had it been ten full years at that point since you’d said please, or only eight?” She can feel his answering eye roll. She turns in his arms, and then strokes his face. “It’s a good thing you did, because that’s part of what convinced me you could still be saved. Part of how I knew that future wasn’t dead. I woke up before you did, remember? There was time to finish you.” She rolls her eye. “Hell, I didn’t just leave you alive, I left you with your saber. I wanted the chance of that future.”

He strokes her face. “It was an image. No sound, no story, and not particularly clear. The outline of a messy sketch, maybe. But it was us, together. You were wearing a gown, and… Obviously, that wasn’t the past. And you showed up in the escape pod and… I’d been rather hoping to have had more time to plan it out, kill him without having to do it on the fly and fast, but that was likely the only way it could have succeeded. Otherwise he’d have the same edge I do against people trying to hurt me.

“But, I knew we’d never get to that future if I did what he wanted. I just… didn’t plan to get there that way.”

“Was that gown a wedding dress?” Rey asks.

“I don’t think so.” He feels her think about that answer. And about what she did to keep her vision of the future alive, and what he did, and said, and offered.

“Lord and Lady Ren?”

He closes his eyes. He doesn’t exactly like admitting this, because she’s made it awfully clear that this isn’t where she wants to go… But she told him of him building with her, so… “Yes… Ruling together. My lady, empress, wife, and equal.” He kisses her. “The light beside my dark. Both of us, in my throne room.”

She nods, eyes solemn, and then says, “Do you feel like that’s still… where were going?”

He inhales, a little shaky, not sure what to say to that. “Do you still sense your vision?”

“Yes. It still feels real, possible. Now you.”

He closes his eyes, and feels the vision of it, seeing it clearer. “Yes.”  

 

 

 

* * *

Kylo knows he’s asleep. He knows his body in lying in a comfortable bed, wrapped around Rey. He often cuddles up behind her when they’re falling asleep, but once asleep, they tend to settle onto their backs, side to side, flanks touching. Since they left Padme’s mausoleum, he hasn’t wanted to let her go. Keeping skin to skin contact matters right now, in a way it normally doesn’t. So he’s asleep, lightly, still on his side, still wrapped around her.

He knows he’s dreaming. That’s always been true about him. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t know the images around him were dreams. That never made his nightmares any less terrifying, it just made him angrier when he woke up because he allowed himself to be scared by figments.

He’s not sure if knowing dreams are dreams is a common thing for Force sensitives or not. When he’s awake, everything around him is alive, and he’s always aware of that. In his dreams, he can’t feel that.

So, he knows he’s dreaming. And he knows for Force sensitives dreaming is a nebulous concept. Just because it’s a dream doesn’t mean it’s not, also, on some level, real. What he can’t tell is if the ghost before him is real.

It’s the same barely post-adolescent twit he remembers from the visit to his rooms, but this is a dream, so he’s got no good feel for if he’s actually talking to a ghost or if he’s just imagining this.

The twit is on a balcony, back to Kylo, overlooking a lake, watching the sunrise or sunset, he doesn’t know which. He knows they’re on Naboo, but it’s not anywhere he’s ever been. He’s deeply skeptical that his mind would conjure this from nothing, so…

“Real then?” Kylo asks.

“Enough,” Anakin replies, turning toward him. He looks around. “This is where I remember her… us… The best moments of my life were spent here, and I wasn’t even supposed to be here. It was supposed to be Obi Wan. He was supposed to be here, as her security. But Kamino heated up, and he went off to investigate, and left me with her.”

“And you fell in love?” Kylo asks, looking around. It’s, romantic, he supposes. If he were here with Rey, he’d likely find it so.

Anakin shrugs, and turns to look back over the water. Kylo joins him, notices he’s about eight centimeters taller than Anakin, and the image of larger-than-life Vader shatters just a bit more. “We met the first time when I was nine. She was the most beautiful woman… ever…”

Kylo doesn’t say, “How could you tell under all that makeup and clothing?” Somehow that feels too impertinent, even for a dream.

Anakin feels it, rolls his eyes. “You never had any business dropping the Solo from your name.”

Kylo glares at his grandfather. “He’s not the only person in the galaxy to have ever mastered sarcasm.” He shakes his head. “And if you’d ever spent any time with my mother, you’d have known that was just as much her as him. Luke was the eternally, painfully earnest one of the two of them.” He looks at Anakin. “You felt Luke. I’ve heard that story, but not her… Why?”

Anakin looks annoyed. “Why does the Force ever do what it does? It didn’t deign to let me sense her until it was too late.”

Kylo sighs, no argument against that. “Why are we here?”

“Willingly… That’s what you wanted to know. Did she come to me willingly?”

Kylo nods, and Anakin looks at him, hard, feeling him. And for a second, Kylo gets a feel for the power of the man next to him, the sense of something colder, darker, and deeper than he’s ever imagined. Something that reminds him of Snoke, the same scent but a different flavor, perhaps. Something that makes him want to step away, far away.

Anakin smirks at that. “You’re strong in the Force, very strong. And wild and dark… but not _that_ strong.” He smirks a little more, and Kylo understands, intensely what _that strong_ means. “If I tested your blood, you’d likely come up at the high end of the normal range for Jedi Midichlorians, call it 19,500. A lot of raw talent, but not off the charts, not even genius level.”

Kylo blinks at that.

“And that was gobbledygook. Don’t worry about it. The best thing the fall of the Jedi brought about was getting rid of that. Your Rey has the right idea, the Force is for and in _everyone,_ not just those with enough power in their blood to levitate a stone.”

Kylo raises one eyebrow. None of this seems connected to what they’re talking about.

“I was nine and she was fourteen the first time we met. She was _glorious,_ a queen in her full power _._ I was a little boy who barely caught her interest. Obi Wan was on the verge of becoming a Master. He was older, stronger, handsome.” Anakin snorts. “Charming. He was always effortlessly charming. She _liked_ him.” Anakin looks down at himself. “I’m nineteen now, a Padawan. She’s twenty-four, a senator. Obi Wan is in his mid-thirties. He’s a master, in his full power, and she _wants_ him. In all the ways a woman wants a man, and with full understanding of what those wants entail. He wants her. He shouldn’t, he does his best not to, and I know he’d never act on it, but I can feel it in him. That’s part of why he’s willing to let me act as her guard, he’s aware of what might happen if it’s just the two of them together for hour after hour, day after day. He’s afraid it’ll move beyond physical desire, which is of course, excusable, assuming he doesn’t let it get out of control, into full on romantic love… into _attachment_ , which is forbidden _._

“She was adorable… loveable… So easily enchanting… Any man would want her.

“I want her too, but I’m the idiot tripping over his tongue and feet trying to impress her. But I want her. I want _all_ of her. I want her body, mind, soul, love, desire… I want her more than I ever wanted anything. And there’s more power in me than any other Jedi before or since. The test didn’t have numbers high enough to read where I landed on the Midichlorian scale. Just by being near her, I can bend her to my will. I’m not even doing it intentionally. I _want_ her so much that my will shifts her, changes her, and she wants me.”

He touches the banister. “We married here. In secret. It was too good to be true, and I knew it. As long as I stayed close to her she kept wanting me, because I wanted her, but if I went away for too long, or she did, she’d start to shift back to her normal feelings. Start to wonder why she’d gone along with this. Start to look at Obi Wan again, enjoy his calm and peace and charm.

“The Council kept sending me away. Or Naboo kept needing her to do things for them.

“I hadn’t seen her for several days… And then she was there, with Obi Wan… They were there to end me. Maybe she wasn’t, maybe that’s not why she thought she’d come, but… that’s how it was going to work out. If I gave myself up, Obi Wan would take me to what was left of the Council, him and Yoda. They would have executed me if I didn’t take care of it myself. And he would have helped her raise our children.

“I saw that flash of it, him free of the Jedi, living with her and our children. Her looking up at him, eyes warm, face soft, flushed, genuine desire… Desire from her own heart, not just mine reflected back at me. I had a mirror shaped like her, and he would have had _her._ ”

Kylo can still feel the anger simmering through Anakin at that idea. “And you almost killed her.”

“Better dead than that,” Anakin says, all but spitting the words.

Kylo spends a moment thinking about that, aware of Rey still in his arms. “I’m not…”

Anakin snorts a laugh. “You aren’t that powerful. You could have Midichlorians oozing out of your pores and you still wouldn’t be able to turn Rey. You two are too equally balanced for that. Padme wasn’t my equal in the Force. If she had been… It would have worked out differently.”

Anakin leans against the railing, looking out over the lake. “You asked if we fell in love here. Love requires choice, and I didn’t give her that. Love puts the needs of your beloved before your own… And if my will shaping hers was unavoidable, if just being near her would do that, what I did with it wasn’t. I knew what she wanted. I knew the shape of the galaxy she was aiming for. I had the power, and access, to do something about it, and I didn’t. She begged me, told me I was breaking her heart, and I didn’t drop to my knees and vow to put it back together.

“I wanted her more than anything, wanted her more strongly than any man has ever wanted a woman, but no, I never loved her.” 

 

 

* * *

Kylo shifts back to awake. He doesn’t open his eyes, doesn’t need to. Rey’s still in his arms. She’s dreaming, too, he can feel that, though he doesn’t delve deep enough to see what she’s seeing.

He breathes deeply, aware of her scent, the feel of her hair against his forehead, the steady in-out of her breath, and the thrum of her heart.

_You’ll never be as strong as Darth Vader._

He never _knew_ Darth Vader. Never knew Anakin. He knew an image, projected from the twisted mind of Snoke, of an idea of power, Snoke’s power. He took a boy, and painted a picture for him, of a dark prince, resting easy in his dark, reveling in his power. He dressed it up in a black cape and mask, gave it a name and a hint of history, a sense of belonging, and deep, complete _purpose_. He wrapped it in approval, offering praise and accomplishment, until after he’d burned the Jedi Temple, and there was no back for him to return to.

He never saw the face of Snoke until Snoke _owned_ him.

And Snoke owned him by toying with his wants. Giving him all the effortless approval and encouraging his dark he could possibly want. But his wants weren’t necessarily _needs._ And they weren’t taking him anywhere he needed to go.

He was strong enough to feel the difference between a need and a want when something… someone, he needed finally came around.

He sees her, at the top of the ramp to the Millennium Falcon, sees the pain etched on her face, feels himself on his knees. She didn’t say ‘You’re breaking my heart,’ that would have meant making an admission neither of them was ready to say, but he felt it.

And changed.

 

 

* * *

Theed has jewelry stores. When they ask the desk clerk, this one a rather helpful man, he points them to an entire street covered in the things.

So, the problem isn’t lack of choice, it’s too much. How anyone picks _one_ ring out of the multitude, let alone the _right_ one, Kylo doesn’t know. He’s half-thinking of suggesting just getting some metal and making them themselves. He’s got tools. They’re both handy. And a simple circle shaped to fit a digit isn’t _that_ difficult to make.

But made themselves won’t be on their fingers today, and seeing them, shop after shop filled with pretty little sparkly things meant to wrap around a person you love, he’s feeling more and more like this is important.

Like this is _right._

She nods to the door of one of the shops, more or less at random. This one seems to have a lot of rings, and fewer necklaces and bracelets, so there’s that going for it, but it’s really not all that different from the one next to it or the one next to that. It’s probably ten meters on a side, and inside there are myriad display cases.

Some of them have plain bands of metal. They call to him. Both of them are far too active with their hands for the kind of ring that has flashy stones or little filigree bits, waiting to get snagged on something. But a simple circle of metal… That would fit the lives they live.

Even the bands aren’t necessarily plain though. Every color and pattern he can imagine, from thick braids of beaten copper and white gold to thin wires of something silvery woven into intricate designs to simple circles of just one metal polished to a sheen, or sanded to a satin matte.

He’d been looking for about ten minutes when he sees the one that feels _right._ Though he’s not sure if it is. She’d likely want something prettier, or more… less… black, but he’s drawn to it, and to the promise he intends to make with it. So he touches it, and raises an eyebrow at her, and the simple band of blackened metal. “This one?”

It’s smaller than she was expecting. “I don’t think it would fit.”

He smiles a little at that. It’s not shocking that he might be looking at the ring for him. After all, it’s just a band of shining black metal. But she’s right, he could probably get it to the first knuckle of his left pinkie finger, it absolutely won’t fit him. “For you.”

“Oh…” She looks from him to the black band and back, and gets a sense of what he’s thinking, and why that color matters. “ _Oh.”_ She presses close to him, and rises on her toes, kissing his lips. “Yes.”

He takes her hand in his, testing each finger, until he finds the one it fits on, her left middle finger, and then kisses it, making a silent promise to himself, and to the life they hope to live.

_I will not be Vader._

 

 

 

* * *

She spends longer looking through the selection. Part of it is that he’s got large fingers, and finding something he can wear takes a bit of effort. Part of it is finding something _right._ She could get him a black band that matches the one he just put on her, but that’s… lacking… something. She wants something with the feel of the Maji, with that intent of balance, and the idea that there’s something solid, tangible, _real_ that they’re building, with and through each other.

That there’s a better galaxy… or at least life… that comes through this.

She snorts; that’s a lot to ask a piece of metal to do.

Finally though, she finds something. It’s gray, which is probably fitting, with a grain of darker and lighter grays, tightly meshed together. “What is it?”

“Wood, originally,” the jeweler replies, “believe it or not. There was a time when the grasslands had trees, and in some places, the trees fell and were covered by bogs. The acids in the water preserved the woods, making them very hard, very strong, and as you can see, this unique gray color.”

“Ky—Ben…” It feels very odd, and wrong to call him that, but he’s on the other side of the store, looking at something small and sparkly, and it’ll look odd if he just comes over without her _saying_ anything to him. However, calling for him isn’t helping, either. He doesn’t realize she’s talking to him until she adds, _Kylo,_ in his head to get his attention.

He comes over, and looks down at it, curious. She wiggles a finger at him, and he gives her his right hand. It doesn’t fit any of those fingers well, so she tries his left, and finds its home on his middle finger. “Do you like it?”

He’s holding out his hand, looking at it, and nods, slowly. “Yes.”

 

 

“Good.”

She kisses his hand, where she placed the ring, _It was alive once, grew in the sunshine._ She squeezes his hand.

His eyes shut for a second and he pulls her close, his lips to her forehead, holding her close for a good minute, until the jeweler, no stranger to lovey couples looking for pretty things, clears his throat.

“I take it you’ve found what you wanted.”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. Let’s get this paid for, then.” The jeweler gets everything totaled up, and Kylo looks at the bill and rapidly comes to the conclusion that they don’t have enough credits left on either of their sticks, or together for that matter. Not if they want to do things like get some lunch and pay for the parking on his ship.

“Can you do a straight account transfer?”

The Jeweler nods. “Prefer it that way, actually.” He takes the bill back and knocks 3% off the price. “The credit company doesn’t take its cut with a straight transfer.”

Kylo takes the datapad, stares at it for a moment, unlike most of the customers, he’s got to actually read the options to find what he wants, but does, and then sets the transfer into place. 

“Would I be right in assuming you don’t want boxes?” the Jeweler asks after Kylo hands the pad back.

Rey shakes her head, sure that this ring isn’t leaving her finger ever again. “No.”

He smiles back at both of them, and says, “I hope they serve you well.”

Kylo rubs his thumb against the ring on his finger, and glances to the one on Rey’s. “They will.”

 

 

* * *

There is exactly one man on the planet Naboo who, if he deigned to read flimsy scandal sheets, though he doesn’t, could confirm a certain story about the Master of the Order and his lady friend. Or, at least confirm the fact that said story isn’t outright impossible.

But he doesn’t read that sort of trash, so he doesn’t know that rumor.

He does know, two months later, when he’s tidying up his accounts, making sure that all of his transfers have gone through properly, and he’s been paid for his goods, that a name pops out at him, because it’s a very _important_ name, and he just about swallows his tongue when he reads it, because obviously the man had to have been in his store and bought… He checks his records… the black platinum and the bog wood rings… Marriage bands, though those words were never spoken, he’s been in this business too long to not know what he sold.

The Jeweler’s not sure what to do with that. Part of him wants to slap a sign on his store, pointing out the Kylo Ren bought his marriage bands there. That would be good advertising. Part of him thinks that since Kylo Ren is not, as best he knows, publicly married, that said sign could get the sort of attention he really doesn’t want.

He tells his wife about it, and she mentions it, with pride, to her sister, who tells her best friend, and eventually whispers of Lady Ren start to pass from one set of ears to another through the _right_ circles on Naboo.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few thoughts on Anakin/Padme... Maybe I'm the only one, but I did not, for a heartbeat, buy the romance they set up in the prequels. And not just in a, 'Why would you go for Anakin when Obi Wan is right over there?' sort of way.
> 
> The whole dynamic feels off. I mean, for the whole movies, the dynamic feels off. They're setting up an ending that just doesn't come. My pet theory is they were intending to make a much darker trilogy and pulled the punch in the third act. (Yes, I'm part of the Darth JarJar fandom.) And if the whole Padme/Anakin thing had been an unwitting Force manipulation, something where Anakin knew, at least subconsciously, that this wasn't *right* his terror over losing Padme would have made a lot more sense. 
> 
> Oh well, that's not the story we got, so... I... shifted things a bit. ; )
> 
> I didn't illustrate, or even attempt to illustrate Padme's tomb, because someone else already did a shatteringly lovely job of it. Go check out: https://erik-maell.deviantart.com/art/Prelims-for-GALAXY-7-Base-Card-Artwork-284122893 if you'd like to see. 
> 
> One last note, the galaxy is a *really* big place, so it takes a long time for local gossip on one system to get off system. Poe or Finn or whomever would have to be actively looking for information about the Master of the Order to even get a hint of that paper. They aren't. 
> 
> And the one guy who is, who avidly collects every rumor he can find about the Master of the Order, already knows that the Master has a lady friend. (Though he will be pleased to see that, when on vacation, the Master appears to have had a good time. )


	29. Gamble

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm out of town this weekend, and tomorrow's going to be busy, so early update for all of you guys! Happy Saturday!

4/29/1

 

“Think I still rule?” Kylo says as they return to his ship, ready to go “home.”

“I think we’d have heard if a coup broke out while you were absent.”

He shrugs. If he, or any other marginally competent officer, were planning one, it’d be dead silent on the _Supremacy_ until after they shot him out of the sky when he attempts to return.

He decides that instead of flying back, he’ll leave the ship with Rey and teleport himself back. Just appearing in his office should go a ways toward reclaiming his command if he’s lost it.

He can always fetch the ship at a later date.

She shakes her head at him, as he opens the hatch. “They aren’t going to overthrow you.”

He snorts a laugh at that. “There are better than even odds that at least a quarter of them would shoot me in the back if they could.”

“Well, this time last year, it was all of them, so things are getting better. Besides, they have to know you’re the only thing holding this together right now, and if you go, so does their power.”

He sighs, sitting in the passenger’s seat. She wants to fly out, so he’s fine with that. “You’re likely right about that.”

 

 

* * *

Once they’re in hyperspeed, hurtling toward Lirium, a thought hits Rey, one she’s been working hard on not having. Namely, part of what she’s coming back with it currency. A lot of it. Way more of it than she should have.

And she still doesn’t have a good story for why.

“I suppose Master Padme stole it wouldn’t exactly go over?”

He looks up from his data pad. He’s already getting back into working mode, checking over his reports. “I’d imagine that depends on if you intend to tell them I’ve robbed the Order blind and then ran away. There’s no way anyone walks out of the _Supremacy_ with that sort of cash without permission, unless they’re never setting foot on it again.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t think so.” They’re both quiet for a moment. “So… what’d we do to get 200,000 credits over two and a half days?”

“They know where we went?” Kylo asks.

“Naboo. Not exactly where.”

They both think about it, very aware of the boxes of coins and paper tucked under one of the bench seats.

For some reason, an image of Lando pops into Kylo’s mind, and then he smiles. “Gambling. Games of chance with people who can manipulate probability and read minds are likely lucrative.”

Rey feels the smile spread across her face. “Gambling… Okay, so… what are popular games?” 

 

 

* * *

They land, and Kylo knows it’s time to get back to being Master Ren. He kisses Rey, holds her close, and she snuggles into him. “Tonight.”

“Tonight.”

It feels odd saying goodbye. It’s not like they don’t do this almost every morning, but… That moment holds, and holds a bit longer, until Rey catches sight of Poe heading toward the ship.

She gives Kylo one last, quick kiss, and he slips out of the ship to his rooms on the _Supremacy_.

His hand is on his saber, his body is ready, his senses on high, but… At least in here, everything is as he left it. Black and tidy. He lets his mind spiral outward, to his office and throne room beyond, and… Nothing seems out of place.

Only one way to find out for sure, and that’s to explore.

He changes out of Padme, feeling a… flush of pleasure at not taking the ring off, of having a tangible mark of her that’s not a mark of anger, or hidden away in front of the wrong people or… He pulls Master Ren back onto his skin, and almost leaves the gloves off.

If he were certain he wasn’t about to walk into a fight, he’d likely keep them off, just to be able to show off his hands, and the _ring._

He banishes that as silliness. His life here is vastly too dangerous to be wandering about without his protections.

Though maybe, depending on what he finds out there, he might get to the point where he doesn’t have to keep every inch of his body covered.

He thinks about the outfits Jon made for him. The Warrior King has gloves and a belt designed for a lightsaber. The Emperor has neither. The Emperor lives in a palace, with his Empress, and they rule a galaxy at peace, and…

And she asked if he still felt that future, and he does, but he also knows they aren’t ready to get there, not yet.

But maybe the path is getting clearer. 

 

 

* * *

“This is sweet!” Poe says, heading up the hatch of Kylo’s non-Order-branded transport ship.

“Thanks.”

Poe keeps looking around, dissecting the ship with a practiced eye. “Your boy knows his way around a ship, I’ll give you that.”

Rey half-inclines her head. “He’s a pilot.”

“He steal this from the Order and wipe it clean?” He’s checking a few places where ship ID numbers are normally located, but they’re clean.

Rey decides this would be a good time to distract Poe, so she grabs the first of the boxes, hands it to him, and takes the lid off.

“Rey!” Poe’s mouth open and closes as he sees what’s in the box. “How…” He’s goggling at the amount of money in front of them. “What did you two do, hold up a bank?”

She smirks. “Nothing like that. Don’t gamble against a Maji. Especially not when two of them are at the table.” She winks at him. “Still think giving me a few days away was a hassle.”

“Good, gods… There’s… what?” He’s staring at the boxes.

“Two hundred and eleven thousand credits worth of currency. I wasn’t sure what kinds you’d need, so…”

“You bring that kind of money back, you can leave as often as you want! Watching the sprogs isn’t that troublesome.”

She smiles at that. “Not sure when we’ll get away again, but it will happen. Meantime… we need things, and I don’t really know what they cost.” She gently presses a toe against the box of currency and nudges it to Poe. “I think you’ve got some shopping to do.”

He’s grinning at her. “Oh… And if Chewie’s willing to go with me… No one slicks a deal like Chewie!” His eyes are sparkling. “A library and a school room. I know you want something like that for the kids. No… that’s the next box. There will be another one, right… We can’t… Oh… God… You read minds!” His eyes go even brighter. “You control motion. Roulette. Oh… 64 to one odds if you bet on one number. You’d have to lose, a lot, for a while, to sell the con. Can’t just plop down money and pull it all in in one throw, but if you had enough seed cash, you could spend a few hours losing, and then… One _big_ hit. Or better yet, you lose for hours, we win a little each turn, and then you have _one_ big one. Oh… Rey… The library, the school, real houses, not these prefab things, a good irrigation system… Greenhouses! Enough seeds to figure out what the hell grows here! Hell, we could get a droid to do that. Get a few of them, one to cover teaching formal subjects, one to figure out what to plant, some sort of weather monitoring thing-“

“We know what the weather’s going to be, rain.”

He shakes his head. “Frost yesterday morning.”

She sighs. It felt like autumn had moved into winter and hopefully they were getting ready to ease out of it to spring. Apparently, they’re easing out of autumn all right, but into winter.

“There has to be summer eventually. It didn’t rain every single day when we moved here.”

He shrugs. “Who cares if it does? We can build a real gym, a space for the kids to run around inside, so they’re not going bonkers trying to stay dry…” He can’t contain the grin. “Every casino. There are literally millions of them scattered through the galaxy. One night, maybe two a month. I can’t believe you didn’t think of this sooner! We’ll get real ships, we’ll teach ‘em how to fly. We’d be able to build a real city here!”

To say that Poe is excited by the potential of Maji gambling is an understatement. He’s _delirious_ at the idea of it. He’s _singing_ about how the lean days are done. He’s _giddy._  

And when he pulls Finn into it, and the possibility of going to Canto Bight to _play_ hits… Okay, he looks around, double checks because Rose isn’t a fan, but… “We are _so_ doing that! The odds on some of those machines…” He’s grinning wide and easy. Then that grin gets even bigger. “She’d be fine with it. We’re going to _cheat._ We’re going to break them from the _inside!_ ” He leaps up, running toward their cottage, eager to share the news. They hear him calling his wife’s name, and Rey wonders if she didn’t just get way in over her head.

Poe nods to the bag that’s got new stuff in it. “Got something to wear to a fancy place in there?” he says with a grin. “Maybe something to go with the ring?” He gently bops her with his hip. “It’s not nice to elope and not invite at least a friend or two.”

“We didn’t elope on vacation, and… are rings common? Rose and Finn don’t have them.”

Poe smirks. “You didn’t… uh huh…” He’s not buying it, but she’s not exactly lying, either. “And not exactly common but not rare, either. It’s a thing on about a quarter of the inner rim worlds. Anywhere settled by the G’Ranthans, and they spread through the galaxy like spores on the wind. So, it’s just… pretty?”

“No. It’s not just pretty. But we didn’t hunt down a registration official and elope, either.”

Poe’s aware that she just made a very specific statement with some serious wiggle room to it. He nods, and it’s clear on his face that he knows that something is up. “A token of Padme’s affection. Good. I want to get drunk and dance at your wedding, too.”

Rey tries to imagine that, and she can… sort of… or maybe, more accurately, she can fantasize about it. The potential for it to be real still seems small. She does say, “I’d like that. Also…” She lifts the bag with her dresses in it. “Uh… I don’t know if it’s fancy enough for something like Canto Bight. It’s nicer than anything else I own, but… We went to Theed, and it’s not fancy by their standards.”

“Told you they were stuffy.”

“And you weren’t wrong! The desk clerk ignored us for seven whole minutes because we weren’t dressed right!”

He sniggers at that and then grabs one of the boxes, puts it on top of another one, and she grabs the third. They’ve got to find a place to put this until they can use it.

“Threepio’s cottage?” Rey asks, sensing what he’s thinking.

“Not like he really needs the space. So… come on, juicy stories. Besides get a ring, what’d you do?”

 

 

* * *

“Ah, you’re back. Splendid.” C8 looks exactly the way he always does. “I’ve kept today’s schedule free of meetings, not knowing exactly when you’d be back, though you do have a good number of communications in need of your attention.” He nods to the stack of datapads on Kylo’s desk. “I know it’s later than normal, but would you like your usual cup of coffee?”

Kylo looks at the stack of datapads representing people who want his attention. It’s a _big_ stack. “Yes.”

“I’ll be back in a few moments.” C8 heads off, and Kylo sits down, pulling the first of the pads to him. His eyes start to scan over the document, and apparently, there is a system that’s willing to offer him a mining colony in exchange for a formal mutual non-aggression treaty.

He’s still reading, nodding slightly, aware of the fact that it’s, as Schiff would likely say, a shit colony, small and badly run, but he can likely do something with it. Just getting good equipment into it would likely make a difference.

He reads further and purses his lips as he gets to the poison pill. He can have the colony and the planet it’s on, as long as he agrees to put no recruiting stations anywhere else in the system. He also notices that the rest of that system will, once he’s got that colony, more or less cut off all contact with it.

He puts the pad down, thinking. Apparently, this _thing_ he’s trying to do is terrifying to a certain class of people.

The question is, is he scaring them into behaving, into building a world of palaces, or is he scaring them into attacking, setting into motion a future where he’ll need to defend himself even more than he currently does.

He has the unsettling sense that both are true, just for different parts of the future that’s coming.

 

 

* * *

“Two hundred and eleven thousand credits…” Rey says.

Finn and Rose share a look. Poe nods. Rey’s sitting at her table with the three of them. If Chewie were on-planet, he’d be here. Threepio’s standing beside the table. The kids are outside, taking advantage of a somewhat sunny, though chilly, day to just run around outside and play.

They’re working on the list, figuring out what they really _need._

“First and foremost and non-negotiable, we’re paying Chewie back. I know he’s sunk a lot of his own money into this, and that comes first, okay,” Rey says. “And Poe, you figure out what you’ve put into this and take it.”

“Rey… I wanted to do it,” Poe says. “You don’t need to pay me.”

“I know. But I want you to be able to _keep_ doing this, you and Chewie, so… call it your rainy day fund or whatever, and take it.”

The others nod.

“Food,” Rose says. “That’s probably the most important thing we get with whatever’s left. If we’re ever going to really _live_ here, we can’t just depend on one lake and the _Falcon_ for food. We’ve got to have some way to feed ourselves.”

Rey nods at that, and Poe agrees, too.

“Like the cottages, there are modular greenhouses and small food farms you can buy,” Threepio says. “Many ships use them for longer term voyages. _Tantive IV_ had one whole deck dedicated just to producing fresh food for the crew.”

“What do you need to run one of them?” Finn asks.

“That, I do not know. I never interfaced with it. I’d assume that it’s just a matter of buying the parts and putting them together, but I’ve never done it,” Threepio says. “When Chewie gets back with R2, he’ll likely have more information than I do. Actually… he’d be a good one to ask. When Luke left to set up his Jedi school, R2 went with him. I know they took on an almost empty planet and built the settlement from scratch.”

“Okay, so, modular food farms,” Poe says. “Say… enough to keep… thirty people in fresh food? Fruit, veggies, and grain. How many more kids can we take here without adding more adults?”

“Not many. I’m about at as many students as I think I can handle. I’m thinking three or four more, and that’s it,” Rey says.

“Could Padme do this? You’ve mentioned he’s Maji, too, and…” Rose adds.

“He’s finding me new people.”

“That you can’t handle without another teacher, and we’re really low on teachers right now,” Poe says. “He’ll be useless as a scout in a few more students, so… Maybe he can teach, and I’ll spend more time scouting. It won’t be the same, but… I can’t teach them how to use the Force, and he could, right?”

“He wouldn’t have to hide any longer if he were here all the time. Once he leaves the Order, it’s not like he’s got to worry about getting outed, and we could double the number of sprogs. That’d be doing something good, right?” Finn says. “Maybe not as exciting as infiltrating the Order, but… We’re not fighting them, so it’s not like we need spies, and once we’ve got as many kids as we can take, it’s not like he can be rescuing them any longer, so… why stay?”

Rey doesn’t have a good answer to that. “We’ll… talk about it. So… okay, modular farms, and… Animals, maybe. Something for milk and something for eggs and maybe some sort of meat animal?”

“More protein would be good,” Rose says, accepting that Rey’s gone as far as she can, for now, on getting Padme here full time. She looks to Threepio. “Do you know if they had modular animal farms?”

“Vat-grown protein?” Finn says. “The First Order had some ships equipped for that. It’s some sort of yeast, and if you give it enough sugar solution it’ll make you… well, it’s edible, and it’s protein.”

“That’s a ringing endorsement,” Poe says.

“It’s not _bad…_ It’s not much of anything really. Just white and bland and squishy. It’s fine mixed into things, but you don’t exactly want to eat it by the spoonful on its own.”

Poe writes that down. “Maybe one of them and some sort of… do you know what a chicken is?”

Finn shakes his head. Rose nods. Rey knows what a chicken is after it’s been cooked, but is a bit fuzzy on the before side of it, because she’s only seen pieces of them on a plate on _The Supremacy_.

“They’re avians, found on many of the core worlds. Bred for meat, eggs, and feathers. They require little in the way of care, and are often used to keep insect populations in check,” Threepio adds.

“Sounds right.” Rose says. Her settlement always had chickens. “They’re tasty, and could probably survive on the bugs around here. Build them some coops, and we’re in eggs, and once the eggs start to hatch and we figure out which ones are roosters, we’ve got meat.”

“What do you do with the feathers?” Rey asks.

“Pluck them off, throw out the stiff ones, use the fluffy ones to make warm blankets and clothing,” Rose says.

“With the right equipment, you can denature the proteins and then reconfigure them into a lightweight plastic.” Threepio says. “Those plastics can be used for anything from clothing to rope to building materials.”

“Chickens,” Poe writes down, and then looks at their list. Three things, after paying himself and Chewie back. Not much of a list, but, realistically, especially if they’re looking for _good_ stuff, that’s all 211,000 credits, if not a bit more.

He sighs again, and crosses out vat-grown protein

Rose raises an eyebrow at him.

“We need seed money to gamble with. This should keep enough behind for us to put a few of us in, lose some, and then have Rey hit big, once, for each of us. Spend the rest of the night on the card tables, round it out by staying a bit ahead, and maybe we can turn 15,000 credits into 500,000 credits.”

Finn whistles. “That wouldn’t be a bad night’s work.”

Rose is grinning. “No, not bad at all.” Her hands rest on her belly, where Baby Tico is squirming around. “Little one is looking forward to making some rich people cry.”

Finn’s grinning now, too. “Oh, they will! When they see us cut through those casinos… Threepio, where do the well-off, well-connected, obscenely rich like to play?”

Poe holds up his hands. “Just remember, that’s not where we’re starting. It’d help if we really knew how to play, first. And second of all, if we’re going where the stakes are high, we’re going to need the kind of seed cash where we can invest hundreds of thousands in the right clothing and the right transport yacht to get us there, and then lose a few million before we win it all back. That’s not where we’re going first.”

“But we’ll get there,” Rose says, eyes sparkling. “We’ll light some new fires, all right.” 

 

 

* * *

When they’ve broken up for the night, and Rey is getting ready for dinner, Threepio is still in her main room, looking… he can’t actually look pensive, or maybe he always looks pensive, but…

“What’s wrong?”

“General Solo used to say to me, ‘Never tell me the odds.’ Many humans don’t find the odds comforting. So I am wondering, would you like the odds of keeping your secret all the way to the end of the year, or the year after, or would you rather just go into it blind?”

Rey blinks.

“Humans remember and recognize based on patterns and associations. Change someone’s clothing and hair style, see them from behind, or far away, or at night, or in the wrong place, and they won’t be able to associate the image to the pattern. I do not work that way. The odds that your Padme just happens to be the _exact_ same size and shape as Kylo Ren are 1 in two hundred forty-five billion—“

“You’re right, I don’t want them.”

“The money is from him.” Threepio says, looking at the black blanket on the chair and the black cutlery that’s wandered from Kylo’s room to their home.

“Yes.”

“He’s been coming here the whole time I’ve been here. I’ve seen him around in his… Padme costume?”

She nods. “Been coming here the whole time there’s been a here.”

“Two years ago, he had an army aimed at us and was shooting our people out of the sky.”

Rey makes her voice stay calm. “And now he’s not.”

“I noticed.” Threepio says, and then he spends a moment thinking. Rey can’t read him, not the way she reads the humans around her, but if she had to guess, he’s feeling a sense of… duty maybe? Finally he says, “If Leia herself had somehow gotten charge of the First Order, it would have looked very similar to what he’s doing with it, which is why I haven’t said anything, and why I will, as long as that’s true, continue to not say anything, but… What do you think you’re doing?”

She shakes her head. “Hoping that if enough time goes by, they’ll see him and not Snoke’s shadow.”

“Have you ever heard the expression ‘having your cake and eating it, too’?”

“No.” Hell, the year before last, she didn’t even know what cake was.

“Think about it.”

She does for a moment, and goes, “Oh.”

“Yes. They will find out. The only questions are: when, and if you’ll be able to rebuild their trust after.”

Rey knows that, cold and hard in her belly. She knows something else, too. “Threepio, what are the odds of them not blaming him for everything Snoke did? Today, I mean. He’s had the Order for almost a year and a half, and he’s _changing_ it. Deeper and faster than anyone else would have ever expected, but… Would they see that? Would they care?”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment. And another one. And finally, “Bad.”

 

 

* * *

Kylo’s still staring at the treaty in front of him. He could more than use the materials on offer. Yeah, it’s a shit colony. But it’s an iron-rich XO planet. Good stores of uranium, too. Ice on it, so maybe water, too. He’s got more than a few things to do with that. It would probably take his people about three months to suck everything of value out of the place and leave a hulk of frozen rock behind.

There’s thirty-thousand people on it, now, and from what he’s reading the Polnians expect him to take custody of them, too. They’re part of what he gets with the colony.

He needs people, too.

He told Rey that he was looking for people, not planets, not systems. But if he takes this deal, he’s cutting off his access to people to get a planet.

He’s feeling it. People. That’s the important part. He could have a planet, a system, full of raw materials, covered in all the mineral wealth he could want, but without people he can’t do anything with them. They’ll just sit there, useless.

That feels right, important, but what to do with that, how to apply it…

How does he get what he _wants?_

He spends another ten minutes staring at the stars and planets whirling around him through his window.

_People._

He takes the contract back, and adds a paragraph. He won’t put any recruiting bases on Polnia’s planets. He won’t demand free travel or trade between the colony and its home world. He does add a ten year right of return to the home world for any of the colonists he’s about to take charge of. 

Scoop them up, treat them right, do well by that colony, and in five years when all 30,000 of them are his citizens, he’ll send them back to Polnia, and make sure that they can get people to him. Recruiting stations have their place, but they’re things, and he’s investing in _people._

And if he does right by them, they’ll get him more _people._

 

 

* * *

About an hour later, as they’re sitting down to dinner, Rey says to Kylo, “Apparently, I’m going to have to learn how to actually gamble. Poe just realized this is the fastest, easiest way to finance everything we want to do.”

Kylo chuckles at that. “I suppose there are worse ways to make money. Want to hear about my gamble for the day?”

“Sure.”

So he tells her about hoping that he can get people and then seed them into Polnia, and then have them bring him new people, or demand access for him.

He can see she’s going along, nodding, listening, but not really caring, or paying much attention.

“You’re distracted.”

She pokes her food. “Yes.”

He waits, letting her fill the silence. And eventually, she does, filling him in on the Padme conundrum. How there’s not much need for him to be part of the Order if he’s not rescuing children for her. He’s not really sure how to respond to that.

The part of him that doesn’t much care for her ‘friends’ is more than comfortable with just showing up in full daylight, in his command blacks, and hitting them with an “It’s me, take it or leave it,” sort of thing.

But the more he thinks of it… Caring about her friends or not, that’s likely the right, best, whatever, way to handle it. He’s not going to ever be anyone other than himself, and they’re unlikely to ever think, “Oh, that Ren’s a great guy, I’m so glad he’s around,” so…

But they matter to her, so…

“I could have told you your parents were traders. That they got sick, and desperate, and gave you to someone to keep you from catching their illness… I could have told you they traded you for medicine, hoping to get better, but unfortunately they died from it. It would have been true, sort of, if you squinted. Would you have preferred that?”

Her eyes are sad, but she’s looking dead at him, not evading it. “Probably. People like the lies that keep them happy.”

“Then I won’t press you to stop lying about me.”

 


	30. Glow

 

5/4/1

 

Babies show up when and as they please. This is one of the inalienable truths of the galaxy as a whole. Often, when they please will not be when their parents please. This, though said parents are often unaware of it, being focused on waiting for said baby to arrive, will eventually be good training in the sort of patience and emergency coping skills necessary for the rest of the adventure that is parenting.

Thus, it is… approximately seventeen months past when Finn (to a lesser extent) and Rose (to a much, _much_ greater extent) would like Baby Tico to get moving, that Baby Tico _finally_ decides that it is, indeed, time to move.

 

 

* * *

All of the Force sensitives on Lirium feel it when Rose goes into labor.

It’s a… unique sensation. The last few days there’d been a sort of urgent swelling, a ripening, a feel of getting ready, and then it burst in a sort of tingly glow.

(Rose will later report that she would have preferred the Maji got the contractions and she got the tingly, bursting glow, but… That’s not the way it works.)

 

 

* * *

The thing is, readiness and tingly, bursting glow aside, babies take a _while_ to get themselves out.

So, yes, there’s this very intense wave of _now_ and _life_ and _new_ all throughout the settlement at Lirium, but… Especially if you aren’t Rose or Finn, there’s just not all that much happening.

 

 

* * *

The other thing is there are, now, eleven Force sensitive children, and nine non-Force sensitive ones, and they’re all really _curious._

The original eight of them, who worked the stables, are at least familiar with how babies get out of their mums and are happily telling everyone else who wants to know, in somewhat gory detail, of how baby Faviers get into the world.

And some of the children remember the births of their younger brothers and sisters, so they add those stories.

Rey listens with interest, because this is an area where the children know more than she does. Women at Niima Station rarely had babies, and she never witnessed it. And she certainly didn’t _feel_ it, not the way she feels this.

 

 

* * *

“Rey.” Halee, Rugh’s older brother, who generally isn’t all that talkative, comes over to her. She can feel how nervous he is.

“What’s wrong?”

“Rose is going to be okay, right?”

“Of course.”

He’s looking up at her, serious, eyes wide. “Do you _know_ that? Feel it, like with the Force? Do you _know_?”

“Uh… No. I don’t.” Though thinking and feeling about it, she’s… pretty sure… not certain, but better than nine out of ten odds, that things are going to be all right. She figures that’s as good as anyone ever gets, and focuses more on Halee. She feels why he’s so nervous. His mum didn’t make it through Rugh’s birth. She reaches out to him. “Come here,” she puts her arms around him, and though he’s generally not too huggy, he accepts the comfort.

“Da said she’d be fine. The doctor knew how to help, but they’d have to leave… Get to the Doc. He came back three days later with Rugh, but Ma wasn’t fine. He took us away. When she was two, he left us. He didn’t want to, but he’d killed the Doctor when Ma died, and they finally tracked him down, so… That was that.”

She hugs him a little tighter, and kisses the top of his head.

She knows he can’t feel the life energy thrumming around them, not the way she does, so she holds his wrist, and lays his fingers on his pulse.

“Feel it?”

“My heartbeat? Of course.”

“Okay, good, now focus on it, really feel it. That’s your life, thrumming around in your body. That’s your Ma and Da, and their moms and dads, and on and on before you to the beginning of time. That’s stardust given breath by the Force, set free to walk the universe, experience it, stretching a billion years before you to a billion years past.” She lifts his hand from his wrist, and lets his fingers hover above his hand. “Feel the heat, the glow? That’s you, here, now, and all of your ghosts, and every drop of love they had for each other, forever alive in your skin, and they’ll live in the skin of your children and their children.”

He looks at his hand. “It’s hard to feel her. I… don’t remember what she looked like anymore.”

Rey nods. “I don’t remember my parents anymore, either. I thought I did, but…”

“But it’s like a story. You heard it so many times, you don’t know if it happened or if you just heard it.”

“Yeah.” She holds his hands. “But they’re still _here._ Whether we feel them or not, they’re literally, _here_. Your body, your soul, your life… It’s them, together, melded through the Force, combined into something new and wonderful, you.”

He gives Rey a little hug. “I think you’re pretty wonderful, too.”

“Thanks.”  

 

 

* * *

Supposedly, walking around is good for labor. It helps get things moving in the right direction, and eases the pain, and it’s just something to do. Dancing is supposed to be good, too.

Rey doesn’t want to be snooping, but she can feel the dance. The high buzz of anticipation. The low pull of centering pain. The slow, easy rock, similar to, but different, from how Finn and Rose got to this moment.

She can sense the touch. Rose’s life doing what it’s meant to do, get this new life out into the world. Finn’s supporting hers, lending her his strength, his body to lean on when she gets tired.

And both of them, together, surging one contraction at a time, toward a new life, a new consciousness.

She supposes it makes sense how this makes her feel, though it also takes her by surprise. Hour after hour of being submersed in this deep, heady thrum of _life._ Of course her body would react to it. Of course it triggers a deep, needy ache, a pull to life, to more life, to existence continuing on and on beyond her and them.

Of course.

After another hour of it, she just can’t take it anymore.

Not alone.

 

 

* * *

_Your room, now!_

_Are you hurt?_ Alarm flashes through Kylo as he hears Rey in his mind.

 _I’m_ really _not. Please!_

_I’m making my excuses._

* * *

“Hello to you, too!” Kylo says, very happily surprised, as he finds himself with two arms full of a half-naked Rey, her legs around his hips, hands in his hair.

She dives in for a fast, hard kiss, while reaching between them, pulling at his trousers.

He’s not sure _why_ this is happening. Well, he understand the general level of why, obviously she’s wanting sex, but not the specific this-particular-second-in-time aspect, let alone the RIGHT NOW aspect of it, but… Compared to his quarterly budget meeting… Okay, no, he has to do that, too, but he can damn well take a ten minute break from it!

 

 

* * *

There is not a single member of Kylo’s general staff who is not aware of the rumors that he has a “friend.”

In fact, not having enough of a coterie of spies and whisper-listeners in place to have gotten said rumor is the sort of thing that should disqualify a man from being on the general staff.

It’s true that none of them are sure how said friend gets onto and off of the _Supremacy_ , because no one’s seen said friend come or go, and s/he… No, that voice is certainly a she, so it’s clear that she doesn’t live in that room, but… Anyway… Apparently, she is _here_ now.

They all _know,_ but… There’s knowing, and then there’s _hearing_ because apparently the sound-proofing between Kylo’s rooms and office is awful, and there’s _hearing_ and then _knowing_ that, in a matter of what it likely to be minutes, judging by what they can hear, they’re going to be facing a man who can fucking read minds and is extremely unlikely to be aware that they can all hear him in his room with his friend who is apparently of a mind that right now is an _excellent_ time for a quickie.

And Kylo appears to be _enthusiastically_ agreeing with her assessment as to the appropriateness of this endeavor.

Kinear’s smirking his ass off, and very quietly says, “It’s good to be young.”

Which gets some quiet chuckling and sniggering from several of the other members of the general staff, none of whom are in any danger of passing for young.

Again, quietly, Kinear says, “Gentlemen, I’m thinking this is a dandy time for you to go find something else to do for an hour or so.” After all, being embarrassed is normal, it happens, but if you can contain it, you should. So, the fewer people The Master has to face when he gets out of that room and realizes that they all heard what he was up to…

They all glance at each other, and decide that Kinear’s likely right, and then shuffle out.

 

 

* * *

Kylo’s heart is beating a million times a minute as the last pulse of his spurt fades into a very pleasant memory. Rey’s in his lap, his face against her shoulder, her lips against his ear, tiny, harsh breaths slowing down against him. He can feel the last few twitches of her body on his, as she comes down from her high.

He lifts his head, slowly, and gently kisses her, following that with, “Not that I minded that, at all, but…”

She smiles at him, and gently kisses him back. She’s never just popped up in the middle of the day and jumped him. “Rose is having her baby, and… It’s very intense and real, and we were talking about life and…” She gives him a little squeeze and feels him twitch, slightly, inside of her in response.

He smiles all over at that, lips, eyes, spirit all brightening, at the idea that she’d seek him out, needing him _now,_ not willing to wait the four hours until tonight, at the feel of that.

She makes a little _mmm…_ sound, snuggling close to him, and then says, “I don’t want to leave.”

He kisses her, and then swallows. He doesn’t want to leave, either. He’s feeling exceptionally relaxed and boneless and right now would be an excellent time to just drop back onto his bed and get a nap with her.

That said, there are twenty men on the other side of his door, waiting for him.  “You don’t have to, but I do. There are twenty of them out there, and…”

“You were in the middle of a meeting?”

He nods.

She’s halfway between a laugh and a cringe. “I didn’t know.”

He smirks, kissing her once more. “Apparently, there are some things I’m willing to ditch… or, at least, pause, a meeting for.”

She stands up, giggling, legs shaky, and calls a towel to hand, cleaning up. “For a moment or two.”

He checks his trousers, they look okay. Down around his knees, they weren’t in danger of getting anything on them. His tunic on the other hand… She already had her pants off when she leapt into his arms, and there are some marks of her… enthusiasm… for this. He starts to strip that off. She hands him the towel and he gently wipes himself off, too.

She pulls her shorts and trousers back on, and he gets his own clothing changed.

“Here,” she says, undoing his hair tie, and then quickly pulling his hair back in the tidy queue he normally wears it in when he’s out there. “I pulled some of it loose.”

He smiles at her, at that, at all of it. He pulls her close, and cups her delta, “Any day, any time, you want to do this for real, and I’m ready. Takes about a month for the preventative to dissolve, and…”

She stands on her tiptoes and kisses him again. “I know.” _Love you._

He blinks, and kisses back. _Love you, too._

 

 

* * *

It’s an odd sensation, and one that Kylo doesn’t often run into. As the top of the heap, he almost never finds himself in a situation where he feels like he’s been caught doing something he ought not to. After all, he’s the man who makes the rules.

The last time he felt this, he was… He’s not entirely sure. Either on the _Supremacy_ , intensely aware of a small hut lit by fire, sitting on a comically small stool, or he was in the fire-lit hut sitting on the comically small stool, just, barely having touched Rey for the first time, to feel a storm of incensed Force aimed right at him as the hut then exploded around them.

And then he was, certainly, on the _Supremacy_.

He still remembers how he responded, looking over his shoulder, _caught._

By Luke.

Of course.

Because it’s not like he doesn’t have 200 other memories of being a teenager and getting _caught_ by Luke doing… a whole slew of things he wasn’t supposed to be doing, ranging from using his lightsaber to work his anger off, instead of _letting it go_ , to yelling at one of the younger students when he was the one “in charge” of breakfast and she burned the porridge, to the second time he had his hand on himself and Luke came in for... Force alone knows what… And… that time he was meditating, and was supposed to be keeping what Luke called the Dark Voice out of his head, but wasn’t… And…

It happened more than often enough that he’s got a deep sense of shame hardwired to just being near Luke. 

But Luke’s gone. And he’s Master of not only a ship, but a political dynasty, and all of that’s fading away as he’s facing a room with just Kinear in it, and he can _feel_ the smirk that’s not making it to Kinear’s face and all of it’s crashing back onto him.

Because he is _CAUGHT!_

Kinear nods, apparently able to read that off Kylo’s face, and then says, “For the next few minutes, we’re going to forget about rank, and position, and who you are, and who I am, and we’re going to have a little chat. An old man to a young one. And when we’re done, I’m going to forget we ever had this chat, and with any luck, you’re going to remember it.”

Kylo bites his lip, but sits at the conference table, and nods.

“First of all. Always make sure you control the sound in a room.”

Kylo nods, slowly. “You _heard_ …”

Kinear smirks, but it’s clear that he apparently _approves_ of this, and that makes his next line a little easier for Kylo to take. “Like you did it in front of us.”

But only a little, Kylo full body winces.

“Second of all, there’s not a man alive who hasn’t, at least once, ended up with his stones flapping about stark naked in the breeze, metaphorically if not literally, so, learn to suck it up, act like you intended it, and then back to business. You can get away with anything if you act like you planned it and you aren’t ashamed of it.”

“You sound like my father.” Han was the champion of pretending that whatever happened he was in control of, and planned it that way.

“I wouldn’t know; I never met him. But if I do, it’s because he was giving you good advice when he said that. Looking like you meant to do whatever it was, and you’re _not_ ashamed of it, will get your further than you can imagine. No shame. No fear. Keep those off your face, and you can get away with almost anything.”

Kylo’s eyes narrow a little at that, because he’s not entirely sure if Kinear’s saying he knows who his father is specifically, or if it’s a general statement that’s true regardless of who Kylo’s father might be. And either way, Kinear’s moving on, fast, from that line.

Kylo’s got the sense that Kinear spent more than enough time around other Force sensitives to know that one of the best ways to not get your mind read is to make sure you never stop on any one thought for any real length of time.

“Third of all, _everyone_ on this ship who matters knows you’ve got a lady friend and have for most of the last year if not longer. It’s normal. Three quarters of us on your general staff are married or have a companion and sometimes both, occasionally with someone else on the side. Even the Emperor had a collection of mistresses. Also, all of us were your age at one point or another, and yes, memory dims the details, but not so far down we don’t remember it. Occasionally skivving off for a pretty girl will, assuming you don’t leave something important, get smirked at, because a lot of us have done it at least once or twice, too. No one expects you to be an asexual monk, so you don’t have to act like one unless it pleases you to do so.”

Kylo nods.

Kinear shifts a bit, gets more serious. “Finally, and this one really is just for you and I. No one on our level is stupid. Greedy, sure. Ruthless, of course. Morally flexible, definitely. But _not_ stupid. Absolutely _no one_ believes that a girl just _happened_ to show up on this ship, and you just _happened_ to take her to Snoke, and she somehow, by _herself_ overpowered you, killed the Praetorian Guard and Snoke, and then just, on her own, skipped away from the ship and vanished, leaving a pretty little power vacuum for you to step into. _No one_ believes that story. No one, _ever_ , believed that story.

“If Hux hadn’t been so damn scared of you, he would have laughed when you tried it.

“None of us cared, Snoke was too unstable to keep in power, and if you had to bring in help to take him out, _no one cared._ Even Hux was fine with it, because he knew _he_ couldn’t take out Snoke on his own.”

Kylo blinks. He knew that Hux didn’t believe that lie. He didn’t know that it had spread that far.

“Most of us, who know about your lady friend, assume she’s the same woman who helped you win your throne.”

Kylo nods at that, too.

“Good. You’ve cleaned a lot of the house. We’ve got your back and are cleaning up the rest. Give us a bit more time and you can show your lady’s face here, safe in the knowledge that she’ll be as much of a hero for taking out Snoke as you are.”

That’s several levels of information Kylo didn’t have, and he takes a moment to sift through and figure out which one is the most important. “You’re… cleaning house?”

“From the top of the spire, it can be hard to see the cracks in the foundations. Though you are doing a very good job with the top levels. We’re taking care of the bottom ranks for you.”

Kylo rubs his lips together for an entirely different reason. “How are you cleaning house?”

“By removing the people who don’t want to go where you’re taking us.”

Kylo nods, slowly, and just as slowly says, “And have they… noticed… your efforts?”

Kinear laughs, truly, genuinely amused by this. “I survived The Old Republic, Palpatine, The New Republic, and Snoke. No one notices if I don’t want them to. If you didn’t look like you had a shot of actually doing something useful, you’d have never known I was even on your staff.”

Kylo tilts his head, acknowledging that’s likely true, he’s got close to 1800 generals, and if Kinear had kept his position lurking about in the middle of nowhere, and done his job properly, he would have never noticed him. “And you’re telling me what you’re up to.”

“Yes. Like I said, tell me where you want to go, and I’ll plot a course. I know you don’t have the full view of it, yet, but you’re working on it, and I’m going to make sure you get there.” He pats Kylo’s shoulder, standing up, ready to go get the rest of the general staff. “With your lady friend.”

Kylo swallows, and spends a moment just _feeling_ Kinear. The offer is genuine. Self-serving. Like Rey said, he knows that his fortune is tied to Kylo doing well, but that doesn’t make his advice any less useful.

“Peace. I don’t care if we’ve got to scale down to get secure. We’ll grow from there. But… peace. A galaxy where they realize that what I’ve got to offer is valuable, so they come of their own accord. Snoke took. He conquered anything that came under his gaze. Not me. I don’t care about land, couldn’t care less about systems. I want people. Get enough of them, and we don’t need planets. The entire universe works because the right people are in the right place at the right time doing the right thing. I want those people wearing my mark, working for _me_. If I don’t have land, I’ll put them in ships, and scatter them across the galaxy, and… We’re changing the game. It’s going to be about alliance and association and ground is just dust. We’ll take it when it falls in our laps because we got enough people in one place who want us to have it.”

Kinear exhales long and slow, he sits down, slowly, and nods, pleased. “That’s a goal, alright.”

“Can you plot me a course?”

Kinear looks excited. “I can damn well try.”

 

 

* * *

Twenty minutes later, the rest of the general staff is assembled. Admiral Schiff, who’s more of a smartass than he needs to be, and more valuable than any two other men at the table, decides he’ll be the one to stick his neck out and test the waters.

“Did you have a refreshing break, sir?”

There’s a heartbeat where Kylo’s feeling like he’s transgressed, stepped out of line, but… He’s the man who draws the damn lines. He can feel a third of the men surrounding him just tensed, afraid of what he’s about to do to Schiff. Another third are expecting him to have a fit, they’re already planning their escapes from the room, looking for the most direct route between them and the door that doesn't involve getting within two meters of him. Schiff’s just staring at him, challenge in his face, daring him to… succeed at this.

He and Kinear didn’t talk about it, he can feel that. Not… in the last hour, but… they’re of a mind and trying to move him to something. Trying to… humanize him.

Snoke was _alien._ He was a nigh-eternal monster in an ornate robe. He was… a dark god bent on domination and pain. And right now Schiff and Kinear are… Kylo can feel it… They are trying to make him distinctly _different_ from that. Men will pledge their lives, service, minds, and wealth to another man they _respect._

And this is part of building that. Part of being _worthy_ of their respect.

He looks Schiff right in the eye and says, “Yes, quite. I’ve often found a quick break to work off tension helps focus the mind. General T’Chandra, I believe you were up.”

Kylo can feel about a quarter of his staff really _approves_ of this. They’re _happy_ to see him do things like that. The third that was getting ready to sprint out, they all relax. Maybe they don’t care as much about him getting his kicks or being the kind of man who has kicks to get, but they do need a leader who they aren’t constantly terrified of.

Kinear and Schiff both seem especially pleased by how he handled that.

He supposes that’s the sort of thing he could actually _talk_ to Kinear about. He supposes that’s the sort of thing he also _should_ talk to Kinear about. Or… maybe Jon…

Snoke was more than a thousand years old by the time Kylo first heard his voice in his head. He’d had literally eons of time to learn _everything_ before he even thought about moving in the direction of trying to rule.

Kylo’s not quite 31. He told Rey about how ridiculous it was that he was supposed to be wise at twenty. It’s less ridiculous now, or would be if he were still Master Kylo, Jedi. But he’s also expanded the sort of thing he’s supposed to know about so widely, that it’s probably more ridiculous than his attempted mantle of wisdom as a brand new “Master.”

But he can borrow it. He can ask for help and advice.

 

 

* * *

 _Eat at home?_ Kylo’s voice in her head.

 _Sure. Uh… why?_ Normally, they eat on the _Supremacy._

_Tell you when I get there._

And a moment later he’s with Rey, standing next to the table, a bowl of mango salad in one hand, and some sort of curry over minced taro in the other. He sets them down and sits on the bench next to her.

She’s looking at him, curiosity all over her face.

He takes a second to feel the… Rey’s right, it’s very present and really intense and not exactly sexual in an erotic sense, but… erotic and life are of course bound to each other in any animal with sexual reproduction, so he can feel how it’s not going to take long to slide over that line, and it’s just… “Oh… That’s…” he doesn’t exactly have words for it. “Nice.”

She smiles. “Yes. Wanted to get here before it ends?”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” And he hadn’t, but he’s glad he’s here and able to feel this. He assumes people have to have babies on the _Supremacy_ but… Between the fact that it’s ten thousand times bigger than Rey’s settlement, and that he’s here, feeling the glow of Baby Tico refracted through almost a dozen Force sensitive minds, too, it’s likely more intense than it’d ever be there.

Rey’s still looking up at him, curious about why they’re here and not in his room.

He feels a little blush on his cheeks. “Uh… Apparently… There’s… uh… no soundproofing between my office and room.”

Rey blinks, slowly, then rubs her lips together, a light pink flush lighting her cheeks, and… “Your office with the twenty members of your general staff in it?”

He nods.

She makes a little, “Eeep!” sort of noise.

He nods again.

She nods back, that pink deepening into red, and then she starts to giggle uncontrollably. Kylo, out of the view of his staff, decides that, yes, all in all, it is fairly funny, and he joins her laughter.

Eventually, she can talk and says, “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah… Maybe next time call me here?”

“Next time?”

He starts to spoon the salad and curry onto plates for them, and then sits down, on the bench next to her. “Well, I didn’t _mind._ ” He flashes her a naughty smile. “And… it led to an interesting conversation with Kinear. And… Schiff wanted to see how far he could push me, so he set a toe past the line by asking if I’d had a refreshing break, and… I told him yes, and that I could focus better after one, and… actually, I could. I’ll usually make sure I’ve got some time to go beat on the training droids between bad meetings, but this was just a boring one. Still… I was much more present for the second half of it.”

She lays a hand on his shoulder, and kisses him. “Are you telling me you think you’ll be a better ruler if you get tuffed regularly between meetings?”

He gives her thigh a gentle squeeze and grins at her. “Your pilot’s a bad influence on you, that’s an awful word.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Do you have a better one?”

He cups his hand around the back of her neck, drawing her over, and gently licks her lower lip before saying, “I’ve always liked _fucked._ ” His voice caresses over it, and his tongue caresses over her lip again. “If you’re old enough to do it, you’re old enough to use an adult word for it.”

In a heartbeat she’s in his lap, rocking against him, hands on his chest. “And _tuffed,_ ” she rolls over him, rubbing just _right,_ “isn’t?”

He’s undoing her belt. “Tuffed is a word for spotty-faced boys giggling with each other, telling lies about the girls they haven’t actually fucked.”

She undoes his belt, taking it off this time instead of working around it. “Uh huh. And you would know?”

He pulls off her belt, and begins undoing her jacket. “I was one, once upon a time.”

She nibbles his lip. “Do a lot of lying about girls you didn’t fuck?”

He smirks, kissing her neck and shoulder as she’s undoing the hooks and eyes on his tunic. “I heard a lot of it.”

His hand finds her breast, worming its way under her shirt, and she pulls his face up to kiss her lips, rocking against him deliciously, moaning softly at the feel of him against her, and his hands on her breast. But rocking is only going to get them so far, and both of them, sitting at her kitchen table, kissing and petting, want _more._ “Unless you let that go, I can’t get your clothing off.”

He pushes the bench back, and she stands up, quickly, he does, too, both of them stripping down. A moment later, she’s sitting on the table, food pushed to the side, her feet on his thighs, and he’s on the bench, running his hands over her back and hips as he sucks a nipple. Her fingers stroke over his hair. He purrs a bit at it, and gasps as she pushes off the table and slips onto him.

It shudders through both of them. The feel of sex and life slipping through both of them in shivery light and supple dark.

“Fuck! You weren’t kidding about this being intense,” grinds out of him through clenched jaws.

She’s shuddering all over, at the stretch of him in her, at the thrum of new life around them, at the _feel_ of how all it comes together, spinning into eternity, both before and behind them, and…

They’re moving fast, grinding against each other, seeking, needing  _more._

“Yes!” her voice, higher, breathy.

His hands grip her thighs, and hers grip his shoulders. Lips meeting, stroking.

“Yes!” his voice, deep, ragged, panted between heavy breaths. He hasn’t prayed in decades, not… the way he was trained to. Not slipping into the flow of the Force and letting it carry him, secure and cradled by it. Not allowing himself to open all of his needs and wants to the Force, letting himself experience them and offer them up.

But he is now.

_Commune together in mutual affection and accord._

He can feel her with him, her body tight with pleasure and life and the feel of the Force and love coming with him. He can feel his body, poised, flush with pleasure and growing tension, and needing and wanting and almost… there… with her.

_Communing together._

They were meant to praise the Force as the giver of all life. That’s what most of the prayers boiled down to. That which turned stardust into _life._ That which turned life into _consciousness._ That which rose consciousness into _discernment._

And he feels all of it right now, present in her body and his, rushing toward both physical bliss and mental contentment and joy, sublime, restful, easy, _joy._

They’re so close. The line between her mind and his melted minutes, hours, seconds… he doesn’t know which… ago. But this time the line between his/their body/life and the eternal, that’s also slipping away. The line between them growing thin and translucent, bleeding away in vibrant color-feels of emotion and motion and sensation and they’re not even sure if they’re moving anymore, and it doesn’t matter if they are or not.

Transcendent. Glowing together. Luminous creatures… that’s what Luke taught them, and right now, they really, truly, _are._

 

__

 

 

* * *

It takes them a long time to untangle from that. Pull their mind back into their body, and then into their own individual forms and from there to let go of each other, though they don’t break physical contact for the rest of the night.

Lying in bed, stroking her hair, he says, “I don’t think that was ever on offer to the Jedi.”

She stretches languidly, purring, rubbing up against him like a content maomao. “Why do you think that?”

“Because you can’t experience that and not _want._ Can’t feel that and not dedicate yourself to getting back there again, can you?”

She nuzzles against his chest and chin. “We’ll get there again. And maybe that was the idea, give up all of your little wants, seeking the one big one?”

“Maybe…” He’s skeptical, but honestly, feels too damn good to fuss with this. “If it was, it got lost in translation. I read almost every book Luke had, and I don’t remember anything about this in there.”

She smirks a little. “Maybe that one got stuffed into a locked trunk. He probably didn’t want you guys just off fucking each other, looking for it.”

Kylo smirks back at her, kissing the top of her head. He could certainly see Luke doing something like that. Then he smiles. “In a trunk Yoda locked a millennium ago. He probably wanted the Jedi to do _something_ other than each other.”

She giggles at that. “Lucky for us we’re Maji.”

He kisses her. “Lucky.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

"Whooooo!"

Kylo’s up, standing on the bed, over Rey, naked, in his defensive crouch, saber lit when the second bit of the loud, exuberant yell that just echoed through Lirium, and pulled him out of deep sleep and his saber to hand without any actual thinking, hits. “She’s here! She’s here!”

He extinguishes the blade and flops back onto their bed, heart galloping, as a fist pounding at the door joins the happy yelling.

“She’s here, Rey! She’s here.”

Rey gets up, giving Kylo a quick glare for singeing the bedspread, before pulling on a night shirt and robe, yelling out, “I’m coming, Finn!”

She closes the door to the bedroom behind her, but Kylo can hear, “She’s here! Paige Liria Tico is here! She’s a bit over three kilos, fifty-two centimeters, she’s got her mama’s eyes and my hair, and she’s the most beautiful girl, ever! Come on, come meet her!”

“How’s Rose?” He can hear her pulling on her boots.

“Fine! Great! Sore and tired, too, but… The droid says that’s normal. They’re both asleep, so I came over. Come on, I want you to meet her!”

He can hear Rey laugh. “In my robe!”

Finn does something, Kylo guesses he’s looking at himself, because he then says, “I’m in my pjs, too. Come on!”

 

 

* * *

Kylo lurks in the back of Rey’s mind. He knows he’s not invited to close, intimate family moments, especially not for the Tico family.

But he does want to share the feel of this with Rey. He can’t see the scene, but he can feel her reactions to it, feel her understand it.

The child is, as newborn babies tend to be, tiny. But there’s knowing they have to be tiny, and holding one for the first time and really _feeling_ the sensation of an entire person fitting in your two hands.

She’s wrapped into a little bundle, and Finn’s showing her off like she’s the most precious jewel in the galaxy.

And to her daddy, she is.

He lets Rey hold her, and the soft, warm weight of her against Rey’s shoulder feels… more intense than he was expecting.

There’s a visceral _wanting_ that goes with it.

And he’s honestly not sure if it’s his or Rey’s or both of theirs.

The little girl starts to cry, and that startles Rey. She doesn’t like not knowing what to do about it. Finn’s still besotted with everything his girl does, so he gently takes her from Rey, and coos to her, “Hungry, baby? Let’s get back to Mama.”

He can sense that Rey’s following Finn, and the shock of seeing Rose, who is apparently several levels _beyond_ tired. What he and Rey know, combined, about babies could fill an especially small thimble, and apparently said thimble is woefully inadequate when it comes to what happens as said baby goes from being inside her mom to outside.

He can feel her swallow the desire to say, “You look like you got run over by a bantha,” as Rose takes Paige back, and slowly, gently, gets her settled for a meal.

Finn’s sitting on the bed, with them, holding both of them, still beaming. Rose is dozing against him. And Paige is slorping away, as her daddy strokes her face.

“Can you get a picture of this?”

He assumes Rey does it. She’s not really thinking about it, just going through the motions, focusing on the family in front of her.

Finn’s voice is quiet as he says, “Makes you want one, doesn’t it?”

He feels the flush of pleasure at that idea, through her, and his own echoes it.

“Don’t deny it. I saw that look.”

Rey still isn’t saying anything.

“She’s gonna need a best friend, someone to watch her back, and go on adventures with,” he’s staring up at her with a big grin. “A little brother or sister, by love if not blood.”

“Finn!” Rose stirs enough to poke him for that. “Lay off. We haven’t even met Padme, yet. Stop planning their family for them.”

Rey gives Rose a gentle squeeze. “Thanks.” Then she looks to Finn. “One of these days.”

 _Yes!_ pounds through Kylo at that.

Finn strokes his daughter’s face again, and kisses his wife. Then he looks to Rey. “You want this, right?”

“Yes.” It’s a small word, but it doesn’t feel that way.

“Then why haven’t we met Padme? Poe says it’s been at least a year. Why do we only catch glimpses of him, from the back, at night?”

Rey shakes her head.

“Is this the double agent thing? If they catch Chewie and me, they’re not going to be asking about Padme. Ren’s not going to grab me and interrogate me personally. They don’t even seem to be looking for Resistance members any longer. The price on my head’s down to a few thousand, and the bounty on Chewie’s higher on the local level than on the Order’s scale.”

“You’ll meet him when you meet him.”

Finn’s eyes narrow at that. Kylo feels the wave of _protective_ surging through Finn right now. Protective towards the people he loves, all of them, including his friend. “There’s something _wrong_ with a man who doesn’t want to meet your family. He won’t show his face to the people who love you, he’s not for you.”

Kylo can tell she smiles at that, but it’s sad. “Chewie’s met him. Leia did, too.”

Finn sighs at that. “There’s something, then. Bring him to her naming celebration.”

“He works, a lot.”

Finn doesn’t say it, but Kylo feels the wave of _bantha shit_ coming off of him. “Even soldiers in the Order have downtime. Twelve off for every twelve on, unless they’re actively fighting. And they aren’t.”

“Finn. Stop it,” Rose says. “She’ll share him with us when she’s ready to. When she’s sure that we can’t give him away.”

“Thanks, Rose. And I will, Finn, but not yet.”

Rose yawns.

“You’ve had an exciting night, and I’m going back to bed. You three rest, okay?” Rey says.

“Okay,” Finn starts to get up, but Rey waves him off. There’s no reason for him to jostle everyone by getting up. She leans down, hugging him, kissing Rose’s cheek, and laying another kiss on Paige’s head.

 

 

* * *

When she’s back in bed, lying against his side, Kylo says, voice low, “I have a feeling that showing up for her naming ceremony would involve significantly more excitement than they’d appreciate for the day.”

She nods against his shoulder. 

He kisses her forehead. “I’d go if that weren’t true.”

“I know,” she says, lips against his shoulder. He’d go strolling through town in the middle of the day in is command blacks if it wouldn’t upset her. They’re not hiding for him.

He rolls over to face her, his forehead against hers. His hand falls to her belly. “Another year?”

“Two, tops.”

 

 

* * *

Some say the sky glowed red when Paige Liria Tico, the first child born on Lirium was announced to the settlement by her daddy.

But that’s the stuff of omens and fairy tales, not real life.

Though the three children who share the hut across the street from Rey’s cabin swear it’s true.  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, a few of you have over the last several chapters suggested that there may be a certain level of willful blindness on the part of Rey's friends on not putting together the puzzle pieces and who Padme is.
> 
> I'm never sure how explicitly to answer things like that, so I'll leave this here: I suggest re-reading the bit about what Anakin was doing with the original Padme, and then thinking about what, say, one and a half very powerful Force users can do, subconsciously, if they really don't want a secret to get out.


	31. Armor/Understanding

5/7/1

 

 

It’s not, by a long shot, the first time Kylo’s trained with other people around. He’ll often multitask by fighting and talking to his generals, two of them have even asked if they could train with him, and though he won’t fight against them, he’s fine with them also going up against the training droids. When he was with Luke, he had at least six other Padawan with him, and they’d fight with each other. And after he took his Knights from the ashes of Luke’s temple, they trained, exclusively, together, until Snoke killed them.

And after that, until he killed Snoke, he trained alone, or with Phasma.

All of that said, Kylo’s never had anyone watch him fight the way Jon is watching him now.

The first moment, when he shucked off his tunic and shirt, Jon’s eyes flicked to his chest, looking for the necklace. But it’s on Rey’s neck today. He’d put it on her right before flashing back to the _Supremacy._

 

__

After the second moment, he’s dissecting Kylo again. Taking apart each joint and tendon, seeing all the angles, and he just keeps doing it as Kylo fights. He doesn’t think anyone’s ever watched him that closely. _Rey_ doesn’t watch him like this, and she’s the only person he knows who thinks he’s pretty and likes to watch him.

It’s almost distracting how thoroughly Jon’s seeing him.

Almost.

He’s not about to do a bad job fighting in front of an audience, though. When three of the droids have been scattered to smoking chunks of wreckage, Kylo stops, and says, “Enough?”

Jon nods, eyes tracing over Kylo from black boots to sweaty hair, and nods again. “Yes.”

Kylo nods, pulling a towel to him, and blots his face and hair. He feels a little jolt when he realizes that Rey’s not the only one who thinks he’s pretty. He’d blink at that, unsure of what to do, but his eyes are closed and he’s got a towel to his face.

Jon’s not flustered at all. He’s completely unaware that Kylo caught the way he was being looked at, because, of course, Kylo’s eyes are not only closed but located on the far side of a towel and currently incapable of making contact with Jon’s gaze.

By the time Kylo’s put the towel down, Jon’s started sketching, and his mind is completely on how to design armor for him, totally professional.

“Are we still on for lunch?” Jon asks, not looking up from the body, Kylo assumes it’s got to be his, that he’s laying out on his pad.

“Yes, I’d like that.”

Jon looks up at him, smiles a little, and nods. “Good. I’ll have these ready for you.”

 

 

* * *

Good as his word, he does. They’re in Kylo’s room, at his table, sketches laid out, along with drinks and sandwiches.

Kylo checks the first sketch. It looks almost identical to his command blacks. The only main difference is that the boots are thicker, the cloak is gone, and the belt has been narrowed and set lower on the hips, giving him easier access to his saber.

“No cloak… or cowl?” Kylo asks.

“Do you want one?” Jon asks between bites of his sandwich.

“It looks imposing.”

Jon nods. “It does. How’s it work with your fight? From what I was watching, it looked like it’d get in the way.”

Kylo rolls his eyes a little. “It’s too hot, screws with my visibility, the only reason I don’t trip over it is my control of the Force, and if anyone got too close, it’d be an easy handhold.”

Jon nods, and taps the sketch. “No cloak, no cowl. You’re already larger than real life, you don’t need to look like a nightmare on top of it.”

“Palaces and castles again?”

Jon inclines his head. “Yes.” He drums his fingers on the sketch, and takes a sip of his tea. “Why do you expect to be fighting?”

“Because I will.”

Jon inclines his head, not understanding.

“I can feel it.” He touches his saber. “There may be a time when I won’t need this, but it isn’t here, yet.”

“Okay.” Jon takes a bite of his sandwich. “When you see yourself out there, blade glowing red, head to toe black, are you fighting to conquer something, or protect something?”

It’s not something he’s thought much about, but when it comes down to it, he’s not terribly interested in conquering much of anything. He wants people, planets, and systems to join him because they want to be with him, not because he held a blade to their throats. “Ideally, protecting what’s mine.”

“And that’s why you don’t have to look like the ghoul in someone’s terrors. Honestly, if the mask wasn’t so iconically yours, I’d redesign that, too. It puts people too much in mind of Darth Vader, and that’s not who you want them thinking of.”

Kylo raises an eyebrow.

“The Emperor was justice. Vader was his executioner. Do you want to be the hand that wields power, or the blade that enforces it?”

That’s something else that Kylo’s never thought of. “Both?”

Jon looks like he’s tasting that idea. He doesn’t seem to think it’s a bad flavor. “Supposedly there was a time when the man who made the laws executed them…”

“Where are you from, Jon?”

“Imperial City.”

Kylo nods. One of the Empire’s core supports.

“And you’re… how old?”

“I was born in 24 AE.” Jon’s use of the Imperial dating system tells Kylo all he needs to know about that. He thinks quickly and decides that 24 AE is 5 BBY, or the same age Kylo is.

“Born and raised for the Empire?”

“My future as an officer planned out from the day my oldest sister was born, and then the next one, and the next, and the next, and finally me. My father was a major. He worked logistics on the second Death Star.”

Kylo winces.

Jon nods. “Yeah. The Empire fell, and on _Coruscant_ …” It’s clear from his voice he resents it not being Imperial City any longer, “things got rough if you were branded ‘Imperials.’ Which we were, but… my mom’s famous. She’s the best dressmaker in the galaxy. The economy fell to shit, the Rebellion with their ‘Republic’ was disrupting everything, but rich people still got married, so my mom never had to worry about work.”

Kylo takes a bite of his own sandwich, and nods to the sketch. “She taught you this?”

“Unwillingly. Men don’t… do this sort of thing, in Imperial City. They especially don’t design pretty dresses for rich ladies, but the Empire was gone, being the son of a Major wasn’t a bragging point anymore, and I didn’t exactly have the sort of job prospects they thought I’d have. Making up sketches, sewing, and pretending it was my sisters’ work was better than starving.”

Kylo knows something about not exactly living up to the future others designed for you. “Did you like it?”

Jon offers him a sharp smile. “Yes, actually. I’m good at it, too. Not as good as my mother, but no one is. Once Snoke showed up, and I had options beyond her dress shop, she more or less booted me out.”

“Oh.”

Jon can read Kylo’s look and he shakes his head a little. “It’s not… bad… just…” he lets that trail off.

“Do you still speak to her?”

“Not every day, but enough. She’s still my mom.” Jon shakes his head. “I’m sorry, sir… blathering away. Let me guess, you and your mom get on fine?”

Kylo doesn’t actually choke on his drink, but only because he knew Jon was going to say it a millisecond before it got out of his mouth. Apparently, his shock is clear on his face though, because Jon says, “Or maybe not.”

It’s an impulsive blurting, a need to let the secret out, just to _say_ it, at least once. “My mom was Leia Organa.”

The only reason Jon doesn’t choke on his drink is that he wasn’t drinking. His eyes all but bug out of his head and he just _stares_ at Kylo. Finally, he says, “ _The_ Leia Organa.”

Kylo nods.

Jon keeps staring for a long moment, and then crumples into hysterical laughter.

Now it’s Kylo’s turn to stare because whatever the joke may be, Jon’s not bringing it to him.

After a few moments of breathless laughing, Jon finally calms himself down enough to say, “Everyone says kids rebel against their parents. Your mom is _the Rebel._ She overturned and entire government, threw the galaxy into chaos, broke the entire system, and you didn’t just join the other side, you _run_ it _._ ” He’s chuckling. “That’s the stone-cold balliest fucking move I’ve ever heard of.” Approval is _beaming_ off of Jon. “I thought not becoming a combat officer was giving my mom a big fuck you,” he sniggers for another moment, “but I’ve got nothing on you.”

Kylo rubs his lips together, and then smiles, a little. “I suppose that’s one way to look at it.”

“Why are you asking me about government stuff? Didn’t you learn this sort of thing as a sprog?”

“Like you said, she was off rebelling. I was home learning half a dozen languages or how to,” he levitates his cup. “How to do… this…” he gestures at the ship, but his meaning, everything around them, is clear, “wasn’t part of it.”

“No. Let me guess, in her ideal world, there are no people like us? We’re all, what, equals, and power isn’t a thing, and we all get along happy and kind.”

Kylo doesn’t exactly roll his eyes, because he’s fairly sure that’s what Leia wanted. He’s also sure she knew she’d never have _that._ “I never got the sense she was that naïve.”

Jon’s eyes widen. “Past tense… Oh… I… shit… I’m sorry.” 

Kylo shrugs. “Like you said, I joined the other side.”

Jon sighs. “She was still your mom, right?”

“Yes.”

“It hurts, no matter how far apart we drift.”

Kylo feels that, the sympathy aimed at him, and nods, allowing himself a moment to feel it, too. “Thank you.”

Jon looks at him curiously.

“The only other person who knows about this empathizes as much as she can, but she lacks the frame of reference to really understand it.”

Jon nods, and gives Kylo’s hand a little squeeze, which Kylo stares at in amazement, before saying, “So, no cloak, no cowl, you’re not up there to terrorize people, you’re up there to protect them. The black and red works wonders for putting the idea of righteous rage into people’s minds, but you don’t need to go any further than that. It’s enough for them to know that they don’t want to bring about your wrath.” 

Kylo figures that’s about as much of an opening as he’s ever going to get, so… “If I wanted to work some colors into my Emperor-wear… How would you suggest doing that?”

Jon doesn’t have a stroke, though he does blink.

“Not red,” Kylo adds.

Jon nods, slowly, and then pointedly looks around them. They’re in a black room, at a black table, with black chairs. The plates are gray. The cups are black. Kylo’s desk is black. His bed is black. His walls are black. The ship they’re flying around in is black.

 

“I’d keep your clothing black, silver, and gray. We can maybe toss some midnight blue and forest green in there, just a bit, on the vests or detailing, probably. But, unless you want to rebrand the whole thing again, those are your colors. You wear them on your body, because you _are_ the Order.” He looks around, sighing… “That said, not _everything_ around you has to be black.” He shrugs a bit. “The _Supremacy_ is a castle. It’s designed to be imposing. Every inch is about instilling fear and subservience. Humans are designed to fear the dark, so Snoke built the biggest, blackest ship to ever traverse the galaxy. If you wanted to add color, this is where I’d do it. Make your home look more like… anywhere else.”

“Make it look like anywhere else, or make it anywhere else?”

Jon shrugs. “That one is up to you. Uh… My friend… She’s one of your tactical officers. She… thinks you’re onto something with scaling down the weapons systems.” Jon’s face hardens. “Do you know how I got to this rank… well, the rank before this one?”

Kylo shakes his head.

“That…” Jon pauses, and when the word comes it’s the vilest curse Kylo’s ever heard, even though the word itself isn’t anything special, “ _bitch_ flew her fucking ship through the design center among other things. I was off-duty. Worked a double the day before and took sixteen instead of twelve off. Decided to have a lay in, sound asleep, having a fairly nice dream, and next thing I knew two thirds of my coworkers and all of my commanding officers were dead.” He grits his teeth. “Everyone used to be too damn scared of Snoke to ever say anything like this, but… Hell, even I… a _design_ officer, knows enough tactics to know you don’t put _everyone_ in one ship. That’s just asking to get killed.

“ _One fucking hit_. She took out a quarter of this ship and a good half of the destroyers behind us, and… And now that she’s done it, anyone else with good-sized ship, no fear of death, and a hyperdrive can do it, too.”

Kylo doesn’t shiver at that, but he suddenly feels it. Ships like the _Supremacy_ are too big to maneuver well. They go in a straight line well enough, and gentle curves are fine, but anything else, like getting out of the way of a destroyer aimed at them, is a hassle. And if someone really wanted to take him out of the skies, about two Star Destroyers would do it. One cut him almost in half, and if they’d had _anything_ to hit him with after that, that would have been the end of him.

Jon nods at him. “It’s a race, sir, isn’t it? You’ve got time, right now, to make yourself so valuable they don’t go and try and blow you out of the sky, but if you’re too slow, someone will build up enough, and they’ll have had the last fifty years of fighting to learn from.”

Kylo nods at that, too.

“So… be useful. Stick floating palaces all over the galaxy. This baby,” he taps the floor beneath their feet with the toe of his boot, “will always have a place. There’s something to be said for dropping out of hyperspeed in this right next to someone who dares to challenge you and blowing them out of the sky yourself, but it’s likely a good idea that not all that many people or things are in here. Plus, it looks way more imposing if this pops up and all of your other ships are next to it, instead of in it.”

That’s giving Kylo an idea of how to disperse his power. “Use the Supremacy as a floating battle station. As a floating target. Keep ships around to go after whatever attacks it, but strip it down to build new things, and keep the important stuff off of it.”

Jon nods. “I like that.” Then he shrugs. Kylo notices that he’s rubbing his fourth finger on his left hand. Like the rest of the officer class, Jon wears gloves, but if Kylo were to guess, there’s a ring under there, or at least used to be. “But I would. My husband kissed me goodbye. I was half asleep when he did it. I woke up a widower because Snoke kept his designers on his flagship, which was also his base of operations, which was also his primary battleship, which a maniac flew through at lightspeed.”

Kylo feels that like a punch. This time it’s his sympathy that comes into play, because just the idea of it makes him want to be sick. “I’m…” his lips open and close and he can’t even begin to put into words how deeply he feels the horror of that.

Jon watches him with interest. “I wasn’t expecting that you’d understand that. You’re not just imagining it, you feel it, don’t you?”

“In my nightmares.”    

Jon doesn’t nod, he’s looking out, at the stars beyond them. “Sometimes you wake up, and realize the nightmare is real. It gets better, and easier, but… You still beg the universe when you go to sleep, to not wake up again, to go back to your dreams.” Jon looks back to Kylo, “Your love…”

Kylo can feel what word Jon’s looking for, so he supplies it, “She.”

“She’s not here, is she?”

“No.”

Jon nods. “You know it then. Feel it in your bones even if it hasn’t worked its way into your brain. You don’t put everything in the world that matters to you in one place. Not when people like to shoot at you.”

Kylo also looks out at the stars beyond them.

There’s a sensation, a memory, clawing its way to the front of his mind. The feeling of a hard, rock hard, harder than flesh and blood could ever be, because, of course, it’s not flesh and blood, hand on his shoulder, the feeling of trying to get free, of begging the Force, the Universe, everything, to make a moment in time stop. But time didn’t stop, it kept marching forward, and suddenly everything in the universe that mattered all died at once.

“That’s how my mother felt.”

“Not even rebels are always wrong.”

 

 

* * *

It’s hours later, after lunch, after his afternoon meetings, when he’s got a few moments to look out over his galaxy.

He sees her reflection in the glass behind him, glowing blue in his black room.

He doesn’t turn to her as he says, “I understand.”

She swallows, and nods, a little smile on her face.

He’s looking at the reflection of her. “Did you need to hear that?” he asks.

“Yes.”

He nods, still looking at her reflection, not turning to face her. “I still disagree, though.”

He sees her reach to rest her hand on his right shoulder, step up beside him, and lay her temple against his left shoulder. “I don’t need you to agree, just understand.”

His eyes close, and he exhales a shaking breath.  “Obi Wan hid you and Luke. You had Luke hide me.” He shakes his head, and rubs his thumb against his middle finger, feeling the ring under his glove. “That ends here.”

She doesn’t reply to that, though she doesn’t let go, either.

 

 

* * *

When Master of the Order Ren scaled down his weapons purchases, that got a _lot_ of discussion in certain quarters. When he began talking with his engineers about designing a ships with the maneuverability of a star destroyer and the carrying capacity of a dreadnought, those discussions began to bloom, again.

No one knows what to make of this, but some people, a few very astute ones, realize that by going smaller, he’s making himself harder to hit.

And that makes them _nervous._

 


	32. The Rumor Master III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, you guys tell me you like my OCs... (wink.)

5/19/1

 

 

 

“Major Frakes…”

Frakes turns, looking down slightly, at the smaller man… he reads the command insignia, _General_ seeking his attention.

He snaps into perfect attention and says, “Sir.”

“Relax, Major.”

He does, marginally. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“Are you Bill Frakes’ boy?”

Jon nods, a bit confused as to why anyone would be asking that. “Yes, sir.”

The general smiles at him. “I thought so. You’ve got the look of him. Not the coloring. He had dark hair, but the shape of your face.”

Frakes nods again. Then says, “I’m sorry, sir, I wouldn’t know.”

The General shakes his head. “He was on the Second Death star. You never got the chance to really know him, did you? I’d forgotten that. Flaming shame, that. He was a good man.”

“So I’ve been told, sir. I’m sorry, sir, you have the advantage of me.”

The general smiles at him. “Kinear. Pat Kinear.”

“General Kinear. May I be of any service?”

“You may be. I’ve been told you’re the one to see about making things look right.”

“Whoever told you that has been very kind.” Jon says, manners perfect.

Kinear smiles up at him. “Take advice from an old man who outranks you by a kilometer, don’t downplay your victories, lad. That’s how you get your stripes.”

“Yes, sir.” Frakes waits patiently. Eventually the old man will get around to whatever it is he wants.

“I’ve gotten word that we’re going to be taking possession of a few new colonies. I’m thinking it might be valuable to have some sort of… reception… A welcome to the Order party. Back in my day when you got your stripes, the other officers would have a party, let you know you belonged.”

Jon doesn’t make a comment about how those days were likely under the Old Republic. “You’d like us to… extend a warm welcome to our newest colonies?”

“Something like that. Invite the people who more or less run things, put them at ease, liquor ‘em up, see what they think is going on when they’re feeling relaxed and open. It’ll be easier to see who’ll work well with us if they’re not afraid we’re about to kill them all.”

Jon doesn’t have a comment on that. “Does Master Ren know about this? He usually speaks with me directly about things like this.”

“He doesn’t, yet. He’s… sometimes a bit more shy about things like this than is optimal. I was hoping I could get you to come up with the sketches and the costs. Once we’ve got that figured out, I’ll hit him with it.”

“If we do this for every colony, it’ll get expensive.”

Kinear grins at him. “That’s the right attitude, lad! We’re going to do this a lot. And, at least right now, I’ve got credits, and I’m in a giving mood.”

“Sir?”

The old general’s looking up at him, eyes bright. “Do you feel it? That we’re on the verge of something great? That we’re _finally_ moving to where we’re supposed to go? We’re building alliances and spreading a system that benefits people. This is important, lad, and it’s time we start putting everything we can to it.”

“Yes,” breathes out of Frakes.

Kinear smiles at him. “That’s worth celebrating, isn’t it?”

Frakes smiles. “I’ll design it for you, sir.”

“Thank you, Major.”

 

 

* * *

“Well…” Admiral Schiff says to Kinear a few hours later.

“He’s young, enthusiastic, loves our Master, completely dedicated to the mission, and not smart or jaded enough to know not to trust me.”

“So, you’re saying he’s perfect,” Schiff replies.

“He’s _perfect,”_ Kinear says with a huge grin.

“And what are we doing with our perfect boy?” Schiff asks as they stroll through the busy hallways of the F deck.

“Right now, I’ve got him planning a state dinner.”

Schiff nods at that. “Does Ren know you’re planning him a state dinner?”

“Not, yet. I told Frakes I wanted it sketched and priced out first, and then I’d hit Ren with it.”

“And, whom are we feting at our state dinner?” Schiff asks.

“We’ve got the colony the Polnians are flogging off on us, the two we’ve taken possession of in the R’Leah system, I think the G’Rnders are going to give us one, and the Ygrines are on the final draft of the non-aggression treaty. Might as well get ‘em all in one place and have a ‘Yay us!’ party.”

“I’m thinking we leave the Ygrines out for now. We can have a separate gathering of them and other people we want non-aggression pacts with. We’re likely better off if we keep the colonizers separate from the colonists.” Kinear nods along with that. A sensible plan. “That said, I can think of three other systems non-aggression pacts would be valuable for.”

“Two parties then, I can get Frakes to plan out both for us,” Kinear adds.

Schiff pulls a datapad out of his pocket and makes a note for himself. “How’d Frakes take the idea?”

“He’s worried it’ll be expensive.”

“Smart boy. We do enough of this sort of stuff, and it will get expensive.”

Kinear waves that off. “This may pinch our purses some, but…”

“But we’ve both been known to make the occasional prurient investment when it’s warranted.”

“Exactly.”

Schiff looks up from his pad to Kinear. “You know, there was a rumor that once upon a time, you’d intended to go into politics when you got out of the Emperor’s army.”

Kinear smiles. That’s an _old_ rumor, and an old wish, one that he thought died a long time ago. “You always were good at this, Josh.”

“You, too, Pat. How many of your grandkids will be running?”

“All six and one of the great-grandsons looks interested, too. You?”

“Four.”

Kinear looks around them, at the bustle of the F Deck. Other than the lack of sky, they could be in any busy town. “He tells me he wants to do away with geography. Planets, land… just dust.”

 _Admiral_ Schiff grins. “Music to my ears. He’s talking to the designers about scaling down.”

“How far?”

“Dreadnoughts.”

“Thank the Force!” _That_ makes Kinear feel significantly better. Of all of Snoke’s stupid ideas, this behemoth is the worst of the bunch. “How many?”

“Looks like seven of them.”

“He’s going to need an Admiral and General for each of them.”

“Yes, he will,” Schiff says.

“You already making your list?”

“Of course,” Schiff replies with a smile.   

Kinear sighs. “Do you miss Canaday right now?”

Schiff shakes his head. “Peavy, too. What they would have done with this…”

“Indeed. So, seven new dreadnoughts.”

“Assuming we can get the materials for them.” Schiff's eyes are dark, tools, people, dry docks, all of that's harder to lay hands on since Starkiller went up.

“Are we going to scrap this hunk?”

“No. He’s decided that if we’re going to fly into battle, having a huge, mostly empty ship shooting at whomever we’re fighting, attracting their attacks is a good plan,” Schiff says. He agrees with that. A big target in the middle of the fight that attracts attention away from his actual weapons, that's just fine by him. “We’ve got three destroyers that are ready for the rubbish heap. Might see what we can salvage and repurpose.”

“That’s… half a dreadnaught?” Kinear is a general. Give him a chunk of ground, or even, the inside of a ship, and he can plan a battle down to the number of batteries he’ll need for the blasters. What goes into building a dreadnaught is a mystery to him.

“Something like that. It’ll take time to get his plans into motion. Five years probably before we can get the first two ships out of the docks. But it’s a plan, and we can do it.”

“You know people in the building trades?” Kinear asks. He knows people in the weapons trade, and people in the logistics trade, and people in the armor trade. Schiff has to have similar contacts, right?

“Before Starkiller blew we had most of it in house. That’s part of why we’re scrabbling to keep up our maintenance. The Rebel scum took out our mechanical training base when they destroyed Starkiller. I can get tools and droids, but replacing my mechanics and engineers… Since Starkiller, I’ve had to outsource most of it, and…” Schiff almost growls, but that wouldn’t be fitting, so he doesn’t.

“Let’s get a bunch of them together, see who we can schmooze into working with us on the cheap for goodwill.”

“That’s a high-demand trade. They’re going to want credits,” Schiff says.

“Then get me a list of building docks that might decide they don’t particularly like their current overlords. And we can schmooze them. This choosing your own leader thing might be catching.”

Schiff grins wide and steady. “And if we don’t go that far, we can put recruiting stations all over them. Maybe The Master will allow us to offer a bounty on skilled trades. Three years’ service leads to citizenship for mechanics and machinists.”

“We can certainly pass that by him.”

Schiff glances around them. On F Deck everyone nearby is an officer or the family of one. Most of the people around them are significantly younger. And a lot of them have numbers, not names. “Speaking of passing things by him, how is letting him know about the condition of our training program going?”

Kinear sighs. The training program is the reason why his grandkids aren’t getting ready to run, yet. He’s not letting any of them set foot in it the way it is now. He’s sure Schiff’s aren’t enlisted, yet, either, for the exact same reason. “It’s going. I know for a fact that it’s in one of the datapads on his desk. He’s just got to pick it up.”

“Good.”

 


	33. Kinear

Normally, I’d tuck a note like this into the next chapter, but the next chapter is already 25 pages long, and I don’t want to distract away from it. (Oh, it’s a GOOD ONE! Huge grin over here!)

One of these days, I should just write the Kinear saga, where a young(ish) (Kylo’s age) Pat Kinear has just left Coruscant’s Police Force: Urban Pacification: Department Level: Under Dark to join the new Army of the Republic as a Clone Trainer. He and his wife (we’ll meet Ellie soon) fight their way through the political/personal battleground of the turbulent fall of the Republic, maintaining their position, moving on and up as supporters of unification under the Emperor. We’ll see them fight, backstab, sweet talk, be in the right place at the right time, and more importantly _not_ be in the wrong place, while also raising a few kids, making a home, and keeping ears to the ground (or maybe eyes to the skies) as the universe around them shifts. By the fall of the Empire, General and Lady Kinear will move on, trying to re-establish themselves among the New Republicans, but the New Republic has the same problem as the Old Republic, massive instability, and a brand new problem, every third officer of the Empire above the rank of Lt. Colonel is off trying to carve his way into a new Empire for himself. Add in a new force, one that’s gaining strength in the Unknown Regions but moving closer and closer to the borders of the Rim worlds, and things are going to get interesting. Perhaps the then retired General Kinear begs the Senate to build an army, to get moving, to do _something_ to try and maintain what was won (in this case, he and Senator Organa will be allies) but he’s old, and an Imperial, and they don’t listen. (After all, the last time an old guy with white hair told the Senate to build an army, he took over the damn thing and named himself Emperor.) That new force, under Snoke, is spreading, and under Snoke, things are stabilizing, an iron fist is better than anarchy, so he changes sides. It won’t take him long to decide that wasn’t the greatest decision he’s ever made, and to scarper off to the furthest edge of Snoke’s space, and just hide out, sending reports indicating that he’s doing a perfectly competent job.

I guess this is me saying, I like Kinear. I have a great time writing Kinear. But… I also like _anti-heroes._ I like morally ambiguous characters who are smarter than everyone else in the room. I like the men who stake out a bit of territory, and decide to defend it with their life, smarts, will, ambition, and will let nothing stand in their way. (Hmmm… who else may I be writing in that vein?)

Kinear loves his wife. He loves his kids, and his grandkids, and his great grandkids. He loves his life. He’s the only member of the Army of the Old Republic still alive and on duty. He has survived four regimes and is on his fifth, and through all of that he’s kept his loves alive and thriving. (Alive *and* thriving.) He intends to see that continue, and as long as Kylo is good for the continued fortune of the Kinear clan, he’ll have an extremely powerful ally who knows every trick in the book, where all the skeletons are buried (and yes, he’s personally responsible for a bunch of them being in the graveyard), and the experience to see the lay of the land and know how to navigate it.

If any of you have spent any time in the Game of Thrones books, he’s a variation of Tywin Lannister, Hand of the King, this version allowed to grow old with his beloved wife at his side. For those of you who liked the Godfather, look at Kinear and see shades of Don Corleone, Vito, not Michael. He is the man who survives everything that comes his way, and will do anything that needs to be done for his family, and he is absolutely the man you want at your back.

But he if ever decides your back isn’t a good place for him and his… Well, Kinear survived Palpatine and Snoke. He’s beyond smart enough to know he can’t take out a Force sensitive leader, but he certainly knows how to get him and his out of their way.

So, as long as Kylo is moving toward a functional, _stable_ system where the currently living four generations of Kinears can thrive, Kinear is utterly, completely, and perfectly trustworthy. In the sense that he can, and will, always be counted on to do whatever needs to be done to keep said system moving in the “right” (meaning good for the Kinears) direction.

Thus, if you ever wonder if you need to fear Kinear, watch Kylo, and decide if what he’s doing is amenable to the rising fortunes of the Kinear clan. As long as it is, Kylo will never have any issues with Kinear.


	34. The Master Sets The Tone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Grab a drink and a quiet place, and settle in. This is a long one, but I had a lot of fun writing it, and I think you're gonna like reading it!

6/8/1

 

“Am I seeing this?” Kylo asks C8.

“That would depend entirely on what _this_ is, sir.”

“Do I have fewer people under my command this month than I did this time last quarter?”

C8 checks the report. “That is accurate.”

Now Kylo’s checking, fast. “We should be getting more than replacement level new troops each month.”

“We are.” Those two words chill Kylo. “At least, we’ve had more new recruits each month than the month before, but we’re losing them fast, too.”

“Losing them fast, how?” He’s flipping through the report on his datapad while C8 checks their internal numbers.

“Of the people you are losing, eight percent are dying, twenty percent are retiring,” that one doesn’t bother Kylo, he’s trying to get _them_ out. “Twenty-two percent are being dismissed. Fifty percent are deserting.”

He blinks, and locates that page in his report. His eyes scan over the page. He’s got people coming in in droves, and leaving almost as fast. The lure of citizenship may get them into his orbit, but it doesn’t _keep_ them.  The shipboard ones stay longer, likely because there’s literally nowhere for them to run to, but pretty much twelve out of ten recruits on the ground are running away within a year.

He digs into the report but nothing is saying _why_ they’re running away.

At least not the sort of why he wants to hear. Officers talking about how slaves just don’t have it in them to stick it out, or that adults just can’t be trained to do the work, and how as soon as their backs are turned, they pull a runner is not what he’s looking for.

“Sir…”

“Mmm…” Kylo’s eyeing the report, willing it to tell him what’s going on.

“Is an eight percent casualty rate among new recruits common? They aren’t seeing battle, correct?”

That brings Kylo up cold. He knows training can be hard. He knows that some number of his recruits will, no matter what, die. Accidents happen, especially when you are giving untrained people extremely dangerous weapons and equipment. That said, eight out of a hundred of them shouldn’t be dead in the first year. The first year is physical conditioning and _baton training_ for the Force’s sake. You’ve got to actively _try_ to kill yourself or someone else with one of them. He’s furiously going through those numbers, and apparently he’s got a _huge_ number of training accidents.

“Get me everything we’ve got on how the Hux method works.”

 

* * *

Brendol Hux was a maniac. He made his son look stable and well-adjusted with a sunny disposition and a mild temperament by comparison. How Armitage Hux became _Hux_ is something Kylo’s never really contemplated, but he’s getting an idea of it. And he’s also coming to the conclusion that if anyone ever really, truly deserved a plate of poison served up to him, it was Brendol Hux.

Maniac or not, Brendol Hux also came up with the single most foolproof method for turning people into, for lack of a better word, droids.

Find them young. He had no interest in anyone over the age of three. Strip away all but the barest of identity. Fill in the void with the First Order. When young, offer them lavish, exuberant praise for anything done _right._ Add _severe, crippling_ punishment for any transgressions. Build up heroes to idolize and villains to _hate._ Move them around often enough so they can’t develop any deep attachments to the people around them. As they get older, strip away the praise, offer it only for extraordinary achievement. Ramp up the punishment. Begin punishing them for the transgressions of those around them. Pet them for punishing their brethren for any transgressions. Wrap all of that in a sense of Force ordained, _holy_ service to a cause greater than any one, or million, or billion people.

By the time someone went through the Hux method, they were owned, utterly owned by the First Order, and would follow orders unquestioningly. They would do anything asked of them, and the hardest of the lot, the ones who kept enough of their minds intact, were able to rise to utterly ruthless officers.

Which is half of Kylo’s problem. Many of his training officers are Hux method grads, so they’ve got no empathy left. The Hux method being the other half.

Kylo never went through the Hux method. Though reading about it, he can see how Snoke handled him through it. He doesn’t know if Hux had the ideas first, and gave them to Snoke, or if Snoke planted the seed and Hux nurtured it.

Maybe they worked on it together.

It doesn’t matter.

He supposes, in that he’s _only_ got an 8% casualty rate, that things are getting better. It used to be 28%. The ones who couldn’t be literally beaten into shape used to be executed. And now, they are recruiting instead of running around the galaxy grabbing people. And now, they don’t shoot people for trying to leave, so…

He’s hemorrhaging troops.

“C8, ready my shuttle, it’s time for a few surprise inspections.”

 

 

* * *

All of his training officers under the age of thirty-five came up through the Hux method. Anyone older than that learned their trade from Palpatine.

So, some of them are professional military, and used to using traditional military training tactics. The problem is, they make up less than a quarter of his trainers, and they’re using the Hux method, just, not from the looks of it, particularly enthusiastically.

The rest of them were intentionally trained to be sociopaths, who have been drilled since toddlerhood on the sacred mission of the Hux method and how it _purifies_ the Order of the unworthy. These are people who truly, honestly, in their bones and guts _believe_ that leaving anyone who _can’t_ follow every order perfectly in place is a betrayal of the Order.

Lovely. He’s got the names of his trainers with the highest kill rate and the highest desertion rate, and unsurprisingly enough, the lowest recruiting and retention rates. The people who’ve run from those stations talk, and what they say makes the entire Order look bad.

 

 

* * *

Hidiri Secundus.

Kylo’s still an hour out from the training station with the highest number of dead recruits. He’s reading up on it as he zips through hyperspace, learning more and more about what he’s about to get into.

He should be recruiting like crazy here. It’s a pit: in many places, a literal pit, a strip mining colony abandoned when the minerals ran out. The parent planet took the equipment out, and left the people to slowly starve. He’s pretty much the only person offering a way off of it. He should be getting thousands of new recruits a week here.

He flips to the next page and scans images of what Hidiri Secundus looks like. He’s wrong about thousands of recruits. He should be getting none because he should have emptied this planet out months ago, and instead he’s got a few dozen trickling in.

Even people living in below subsistence level hand-to-mouth scrabbling in an abandoned colony on a barren lump of rock prefer it to submitting themselves to the Hux method. (He makes a note to find out why it was abandoned. There’s probably something of value there, might as well scavenge it. As the thought goes through his head, he finds himself smirking; Rey’d likely appreciate this.)

Apparently, in an effort to maintain maximum capacity utilization, one of his logistics officers decided to ship people recruited from other planets here for training. After all, it wouldn’t do to have extra billets empty. (Which is making the locals even less fond of the Order. Not only are they poor, but now there are even more people kicking around, using up the scarce resources.)

And from what he can tell, the only thing he’s doing with the ones who aren’t running away is filling the local graveyards. His training program, for adult stormtroopers, lasts three years. Specialized training can continue for well into a decade after that. For children and subadults, it’s longer. So, as of this point, there have been no graduates since he took over, there just couldn’t be.

But his casualty rate for the trainees who have been here for the full two years is 63%.

That’s high, even for the Hux method.

That’s high for their elite Death Trooper commands, where they intentionally fail three out of four recruits. (Though in this case _fail_ means gets sent back to their previous command. Still it’s hard and dangerous, and troops die training for it.)

Hell, more than 37% of them survived Starkiller. More than 37% of the compliment of the _Supremacy_ survived Holdo running a ship through it.

“Who am I meeting?” he asks C8 through the comm as he’s hurtling through space.

“Commander RW-5879.”

“Of course,” Kylo says under his breath. There was no chance this man or woman would have a name.

“Sir?”

“Don’t worry about it. Does he… she know I’m coming?”

“No sir. Would you like him to?”

“My ETA is an hour from now. Give him a heads up in fifty-five minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

 

 

* * *

RW-5879 is nervous, and pleased, and shaken, to have Kylo just appear. Granted, Kylo can only tell that because he can _feel_ RW-5879’s emotions. He can’t see anything because he’s covered head to toe in Stormtrooper armor.

And the only reason he can feel it, is because he’s focusing _hard_ on RW-5879. Hidiri Secundus is a pit all right. A pit of pain and fear and anger. Just standing here, in RW-5879’s office, physically _hurts._ Kylo’s sure any untrained Force sensitive would curl into a catatonic ball within an hour of being exposed to this place.

Snoke likely would have considered it a cheery vacation spot.

“I understand you’re the most demanding trainer in my army.” Kylo wishes he had his own mask on. It’d be so much easier to do this if RW-5879 couldn’t see him.

“My Lord!” he straightens up, beaming, thinking it’s a compliment.

“Soldiers who go through your system never question an order again, do they?”

“Never! You can tell them to murder their babies, and they’ll do it.”

Kylo makes himself not blink, not feel that glow that’s been following Finn and Rose around for the last month, like a bright, warm beacon, not feel the clawing sickness of the idea of snuffing it out. “I’d like to watch what you do and how you do it.”

“My LORD!” he’s snapped to attention, pride beaming off of him.

“Do you have an appropriate lesson for me to observe?”

“Tomorrow. It doesn’t do to pile too many of them up in one day. They need time to let them sink in.”

“I’ll defer to your judgement on this, RW-5879.”

“Thank you, My Lord. Have you a room?”

“My accommodations are taken care of.” He’s not spending a moment here longer than necessary. Once he’s done with this conversation, he’s getting to Rey’s and likely spending as long as she’ll let him just touching her.

“Yes, My Lord. We start at dawn.”

“Then meet me a few minutes before, and I will observe.”

“Excellent. It’s a new group of them. Third session. We’re going over baton holds.”

Kylo supposes that that would be a good first weapon to work with. The chance of hurting yourself with one is low, and it allows you to build strength, balance, and dexterity.

“I’ll see you in the morning.” Then he returns to his ship, and gets out of there, as fast as he can.

 

 

* * *

He’s an hour and a half at hyperspeed from Lirium.

Fuck that.

He stops his ship, leaving it in extreme orbit of Hidiri Secundus. He’s not wasting time in transit. He’s just… not. He pulls himself off the ship to Rey’s cottage.

 

 

* * *

There’s still an hour before Rey’s normally done with her part of the day. He’s not supposed to be back at the _Supremacy,_ and even if he was supposed to go back, he just doesn’t want to. Right now, he wants to be here, in a tidy cottage, with a kitchen table at his back, and a cooker in front of him, sunlight filtered through curtains, and the chill of oncoming winter in the air.

He takes a moment to peel Master Ren off. Most of him. The tunic, gloves, belt and saber all get hung up in their bedroom. The Maji token is on Rey’s throat now, and he knows he’s not going back there without it.

An hour to kill, too many thoughts, not enough to do, not enough he wants to do… He spends a moment in the kitchen, getting a glass of water, and looking around blankly, trying to not feel _that place._ He spends another few moments pacing around the kitchen and living area. Eight steps wall to wall for him. It’s not a huge space.

Eventually, it occurs to him that he’s the one who makes sure they eat at night, and if he’s not going back to the _Supremacy,_ than their usual meal isn’t coming home with him. She’s got enough provisions for him to make them supper, so… It’s been more than a decade since he’s cooked, but he’s fairly sure he remembers how to apply heat to food. Not like he’s going to make anything particularly complicated, probably just toast and eggs and coffee. Just… something to keep his hands and body busy right now.

Something to keep him moving, because it’s easier to think when he moves. He starts to gather up everything he needs, and a few things he likely doesn’t, searching through her small stock of food for something to season everything with.

 _The Supremacy_ used to feel like Hidiri Secundus. Snoke certainly did. Kylo used to live that feel, every day, every minute. It soaked into his skin and bones, whooshed through his lungs with his breath, and thrummed in his veins with his blood. He was a fish swimming in it, unable to feel it until he wasn’t living in it, and now… Now, in a warming kitchen, he can shudder all over as much as he needs to, trying to distance himself from the feel of that place.

Rey told him about the kids asking about evil versus dark, and right now, it’s _exceptionally_ clear to him what the difference is.

He’s dark. He always will be dark. He’s fast to anger, easy to insult, easy to hurt, likely to see the worst possible version of whatever is coming his way, wild, digging his way out of a lot of self-doubt-and-loathing, lacking at least a few, if not all, of his middle gears, and destructive. But he’s not… those places.

All of that pain, all of that suffering, none of it is necessary, none of it matters, not on any important level, all of it was there because men like RW-5879 _enjoy_ it.

Because Snoke _enjoyed_ it.

Because pain makes men weak, makes them pliable, makes them into slaves, and Snoke loved nothing better than whimpering men at his knees begging for surcease.

 

He surveys the food he’s put together on the counter, and pulls an egg to him. Omelets are easy, and they’ve got what they need to make one. The egg lands in his hand with a gentle touch, cool shell against warm skin, one swift crack, a little pull, and it’s shattered in his hand, splatting into the blow beneath.

He can feel the memory of Snoke, see him rending the Knights of Ren with his control of the Force, ripping them limb from limb, shredding their minds with the physical pain of it, and he was screaming at it in his own mind, howling, tears streaming down his face. But he never gave it voice.

He can feel Snoke tearing through Rey with the Force, and knows that he wanted to see if this time he could get a sound out of Kylo. He knows that was the point of his claim about the Force bond, the only reason he said it was to add extra pain on top of everything else.

To see how badly he could hurt Kylo before he broke.

Kylo’s whipping the eggs into a froth, much more of a froth than they need to be. He’s well on his way to a soufflé.

Snoke got to see what happened when Kylo finally broke. There was a good few seconds where he was still alive, long enough for him to _know_ what had just happened to him. Kylo still enjoys that look on Snoke’s face, and the utter shock of it burning through their bond.

That’s the thing about throwing cold water on molten glass, you never know where the shards are going to land.

 

 

* * *

“All is as the Force wills it. You remember saying that to me?” he asks Rey as they lay together in bed, his arms wrapped around her. They should be drifting toward sleep, but he’s dreading setting foot back on Hidiri Secundus, and she has a hard time sleeping when she can feel he’s this distressed.

He can feel she’s startled that he’d ask that. They talk about… all sorts of things, but he rarely shows any interest in digging deep into the philosophy or theology of the Force, or how she’s morphing that into a theory of the Maji. She’s never felt any desire to push that. Anyone even remotely familiar with Ben Solo can feel that’s a thorny patch in his history.

Plus, she’s got a sense that… if and when it matters, he’ll come to it. Maybe, today, it matters. “What’s got you asking that?”

He gently strokes the hair on her neck, kissing her shoulder. “Today, everything, the last two years…”

She rolls over to face him. “When I said it the first time… It was… I don’t know, a safety net. Now… I don’t know if the Force has a will.” She rests her cheek against his chest, her temple against the scar from where she ran him through with her lightsaber. “I know, the first time I was talking to the children about it, that I said the Force seeks balance. And that still feels right.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know if that’s a will, though. Or… what’s the word for it? When you pour hot liquid into cold, and they seek to get to the same temperature.”

“Entropy?”

“Sure.”

His voice is quiet as he says, “Luke used to talk about the Living Force and the Unifying Force.”

Rey nods, feeling his mind wandering about these ideas. “I read those.”

“Lucky you. I had to steal the books on the Unifying Force. Got caught about halfway through the first one, then he hid the damn things.”

“Because they didn’t believe in the light or dark, just that there was a _Force_ and we’re all moving through it. Living Force is about now. You and I and everything alive here, in this moment, now. Light and dark and moving from one minute to the next. Unifying Force is beyond that. All of the universe, stardust to light to sound to us, all of it connected, thought time and space, and each of us moves through that to a destiny.”

“I knew there was good stuff in there. He’d talk just enough about the Unifying Force to know that he believed that all of it, not just us, living things, were part of it, and that destiny was tied in there somewhere, too.”

“And…”

His chin is on the top of her head, his arms are wrapped around her, and she can feel his heart beating against her lips. “Just… feeling it, I guess. Is this… us… destiny… Did the Force… do this to us? For us?”

“To… we know there’s at least some _to us._ ”

“Maybe. I felt that bond snap into place the first moment I touched your mind and realized you’d touched back. I didn’t expect it to go there, but… I felt it.”

She kisses his throat. “I know. I felt it, too. It didn’t feel like anything I put into motion, though.”

“Me, either. It just… was. I may have walked myself to the trap on my own, but it snapping shut wasn’t my design.”

She feels that, thinks about it. “Probably a less romantic than ideal description, but… Yes. Everything to get to that chair may have been in my hands, but what happened when your mind brushed mine wasn’t.”

He holds her a little closer, a bit tighter. “Does it bother you that we’re not here of our own choice?”

“I think we’re _here_ of our own choice. Maybe we have a great destiny. Maybe… The Unifying Force granted us a path, but staying on it, finding it even, that’s up to us.”

“You believe that?”

“Yes.” Her hand is on his chest, over his heart. “I guess I do believe the Force has a will. It’s trying to get us somewhere, but it’s up to us to go there.”

“Better to be a fish swimming in a current than a puppet on strings.”

“Yes. It’s nudging us along, but we don’t have to go along.” She kisses his chest again. “Is that comforting or not?” She feels him close his eyes in the dark and rub his lips together.

“The puppet can’t get it wrong. He’s just dangling.” She cuddles against him, trying to comfort him with her touch. “I’m so afraid I’m going to fuck all of this up.”

“You’re not.”

He snorts at that.

“Hey…” She reaches behind herself with her left hand, grabbing his at the small of her back, and makes sure that their rings just slightly click against each other. “Tell me about Lord and Lady Ren… You still see it, right?”

He closes his eyes. “Yes. It’s still there.”

“Getting clearer.”

He tries to focus on it, see it, and… “Yes.”

“Then you’re still on the right path. That’s the second half of that book. The Unifying Force gives us hints of where we’re supposed to go, gives us visions and premonitions to aid us in our path, and getting there is up to us. If you can still see it…”

“Do you still see us building?”

He feels the smile against his chest. “Yes. That’s getting clearer, too. Maybe, on occasion, Lord Ren engages in acts of carpentry.”

She feels his eyes roll. “Lord Ren has people for that. He’s stuck in boring meetings.”

“Maybe sometimes he goes out into the sunshine and builds things to burn off some of the stress.”

“Maybe.” 

 

 

* * *

6/9/1

 

“LINE UP!”

Kylo is aware of the fact that they train children. At least, in the sense that, were you to ask him how old their youngest recruits are, he can tell you that he put a stop to stealing babies a bit over a year and a half ago, and previous to that, the Hux method took promising toddlers from all over the galaxy. So, the youngest members of The Order are somewhere around three years old.

So he _knows_ they train children.

And he knows that they turn no one away from his recruiting station, so if a family comes, they take _all_ of them. And he knows that every planet in the galaxy has runaways, lost children, and in many of the non-core worlds, slaves. He _knows_ this.

Seeing eighteen people of indeterminate sex, all with the same shaved heads, same gray pajama uniforms, all of them holding small batons, all of them about thigh high on him, is a different matter all-together.

It returns him to memories of his first days with Luke, when he and M’Gll, Rona, and Blynn all had their little beige rompers and brown robes. He was eight. He assumes these children are somewhere around six.

The children all have “LINE UP!” down pat. They’re in nice straight lines, exactly a meter and a half apart from each other in all directions.

RW-5879 walks between them, eyeing them, and Kylo can feel the fear _pouring_ off of them. They won’t have to be trained to crouch to get into defensive position, not like he was. They’re a millisecond away from dropping into one to protect themselves.

 

 

* * *

He was twenty-two, and it was his first fight with the Praetorian Guards. Snoke had said, “Let’s see what you’ve learned, Master of the Knights of Ren.”

He’d been feeling cocky. Standing tall, proud, Jedi-approved training posture. He’d just killed Tash M’Gll _and_ beaten Luke Skywalker, how hard could ghosts in red be? After all, he had a lightsaber, and the Guard just had a baton.

“May I suggest you give some thought to your legs?” Snoke said, a second before the attack began.

It took less than thirty seconds for the Guard to shatter his left shin. He kept standing for a full minute past that, fighting on the one leg, before the pain and exhaustion got the better of him.

When he went down, the Guard broke the other one, just to do it.

“Stand, Master Ren.”

“I…”

“Stand.”

He pulled himself up with the Force, feet barely brushing the ground, pain pouring through him so hard he threw up.

“Next time you fight, stay low, protect your legs.”

He never had to be told again, and he knows these children will never need to have that lesson spelled out for them, either. They’re all been hit often enough to know to crouch.

 

 

* * *

“’TONS OUT!”

All eighteen of them whip their batons to their full length, and hold them, in two hands, out in front of them.

RW-5879 continues walking around, looking, seeking out failure.

Kylo feels the hit start a heartbeat before RW-5879 strikes, and it takes all of his control to not jump him.

“WRONG HAND!”

“RW-5879?”

“Master Ren?”

“Did you just break a six-year-old’s hand for holding a baton wrong?”

“Yes, sir! QR-9917’s been told how to do it right two times before. She refuses to do it right.”

The girl in question is on the ground, clutching her hand, sobbing.

“That child is left-handed.”

“Not anymore, Sir! We set the bones, sir, but don’t heal them. By the time it heals naturally, she’ll be a righty.”

The girl continues to scream, holding her hand.

RW-5879’s ignoring her, watching Kylo, who’s watching to see what he does next. They hold the gaze for a moment, and then RW-5879 shouts out, “FIRST POSITION, RIGHT LEG LEAD!”

“Are you going to leave her on the ground?”

“Yes, sir! Focuses the rest of them, sir. None of them will make a misstep for the rest of the lesson, my Lord.”

Kylo steps over, picking up the child, gently, trying to not touch her hand. “Does one of them fail a task every lesson?”

“Yes, sir! That’s part of how it works, sir.”

Kylo nods, and then breaks his attention from RW-5879. The girl’s terror has gone up by a factor of ten or so, and she does not want to be in his arms right now. He can feel that she’s sure that if she breaks formation, something even worse will happen to her. She’s begging to be put back on the ground. He tries to use the Force to dull the pain and soothe her, but both of those are light skills, and even in the best of circumstance, calm, quiet, being encouraged to do it, he’s always been miserable at them. Attempting to do it when he’s not murdering someone only because he’s planning a much messier and grander way to kill him is futile. He knocks her unconscious instead, and she goes limp in his arms. He feels the further spike of fear in every child around them, all certain he just murdered their companion. He doesn’t have a fix for that.

“And what happens to the ones who fail several times, RW-5879?”

“These little guys, not much. We keep drilling them, sir. Once they get over twelve, we execute them after ten fails, in front of the rest.”

“Ah.” All things considered a 63% casualty rate is likely low, then.

“It works, sir. Enough fear, enough pain, and they’ll master anything. If you get through my program, sir, you’ll follow any and every order, and you’ll do it perfectly.”

“Yes, I’d imagine.” Kylo nods. He does imagine. Specifically at least a dozen excruciating and gory ways he’s going to personally kill this man. “In five days, there will be a training conference on the _Supremacy_. I’d appreciate you being one of my guests of honor.”

He can feel the swell of pride raising through RW-5879.

“I’d like you to take between now and then to write out your technique, in detail. Prepare an in-depth demonstration of what you do here. Cease your current training schedule. Focus entirely on the presentation. I’m sure they can take a week off.”

“It’ll put us behind.”

Kylo’s eyes are cold. “I’ll forgive it. In five days I want you, every trainer at this place, and three of your most promising classes, including this one, on the _Supremacy_. Our numbers have been unsatisfactory lately, and we’re going to see about shifting that.”

He’s so happy at the idea of being part of how that shift is going to happen, he’s completely blind to the feel of Kylo’s words. If he’d been even remotely paying attention, he’d have felt the threat, but he’s not.

“Yes, sir!”

“Thank you, RW-5879.” He turns, with the girl still in his arms.

“What are you going to do with that one?”

“That no longer concerns you.”

RW-5879 swallows, hard, starting to feel off foot.

 

 

* * *

Kylo walks, fast, back to his ship, and as soon as he’s on it, he punches in the coordinates for Lirium. At hyperspeed it’s an hour and a half ride. He’s in his command blacks, his full, working, in charge, Master of the Order garb. Nothing about him is even remotely Padme right now, and he also doesn’t have his Padme clothing anywhere nearby.

And he’s in his personal, Order-branded TIE.

So much for that plan.

_I’ve got someone for you._

_Now?_

He materializes in Rey’s cottage. _Yes._

_I’ll be there in a minute. What happened?_

_A problem I’m fixing. I’ll tell you about it tonight._

_Okay._

He lays the girl on their bed, and wipes her memory. She was standing in formation. She was holding her baton. And when she wakes up, that’s where things will end. He knows they will tell her that Master Padme rescued her, and that will be that.

Kylo wraps a blanket around her, and returns to his ship, knowing Rey will get her to the medbay. 

 

 

* * *

“Your friend, Finn, is an incredible man,” he says to Rey later that night.

“I agree.” The idea that he does though… “It’s that bad?”

“It’s worse.” He shakes his head. “Just getting an idea of what he survived, and what he broke free of.”

“He… doesn’t talk about it.”

Kylo nods. “I’d bet not. Today’s little one… Does she have a name?”

“No, just a number. Once her bones got set and healed, she wanted to go back… She’s staying with Finn and Rose and Paige right now.”

Kylo nods. “She was struggling in my arms, afraid of what would happen if she stepped out of formation.”

“What happened?”

“He broke her hand for holding a baton ‘wrong.’”

Rey’s lip curls in disgust. “That happen a lot?”

“Apparently, one of them gets something wrong every session, and gets _punished_ for it. It encourages the others to do better.”

He can feel the curdled revulsion slide through Rey, and he nods.

“What are you going to do about it?”

The smile on Kylo’s face is breathtakingly cold. “I think RW-5879 and I are going to do a little training.”

“You’re going to kill him.”

“I’m going to _destroy_ him, _after_ everyone sees what he was doing. I am going to make sure none of my trainers think that’s an appropriate training technique, and I will make sure all of them know on a visceral level that if they ever try any of his techniques again, I will personally take them apart with a lightsaber and possibly my bare hands, in front of all the rest of them, just for kicks and giggles.”

And for once, he doesn’t feel any sense of revulsion from Rey when he’s talking about, and planning on enjoying, a spot of _intense_ ultraviolence.

 

 

* * *

6/10/1

 

His next stop has the highest number of runners.  Not so many casualties, but they can’t keep recruits.

Running, he understands. It’s a market world. Traders and ships are moving through all the time. If you had even a week’s pay in your pocket, you could get out of here and off to… Anywhere. But that’s true for everyone. Any week’s worth of pay would get you a ticket on _something._

So… It’s not like you’d have to join the Order to get out of here. Maybe miss a few meals or be willing to trade something you’d rather not, but you can get away from Myrtuum Ping. At least, if you can get to one of his recruiting stations, you can just as easily get to the port.

And, from the numbers he’s looking at 50% of the people who go to his recruiting station here, and an addition 85% of the ones who get shipped here, because again, it wouldn’t do to have an empty billet at any training facility, are taking advantage of this.

 

 

* * *

On the upside, standing here does not, literally, hurt.

It does, however, make his stomach curdle.

Not having gone through the Hux method himself, there was another aspect he wasn’t aware of, but it’s smacking him in the face as he plows through this training facility.

It’s sex segregated.

But the trainers aren’t.

And he’s not sure if it would matter all that much if the trainers here were women, too. He’s sure just the power differential would mean there would be issues, but… Maybe it wouldn’t be _as much_ of a problem.

Again, on the upside, though he supposes that if you’re going through it, it’s not much of an upside, Captain Tomlinson, in his smart, perfectly pressed command uniform, no armor for him, and Kylo’s fairly certain _why_ he’s not wearing armor, isn’t a sadist.

He’s just a lecherous idiot with too much power.

And an entire command filled with women who require his good opinion of them to advance.

 

 

* * *

They very much are not wearing identical shaved heads and gray coveralls.

The ladies in this contingent are being “uniformed” if he can call it that, in the smallest, tightest outfits he’s ever laid eyes on. He’s fairly certain these black, skintight things that just barely wrap around their chests and hips are _not_ standard anything for the Order. (Though he supposes they could possibly be the lady’s underwear. He’s never actually investigated if they’ve got uniform undies, though he supposes they must. After all, _he_ has uniform underwear, so everyone must, right?)

“Back straight, chest out, right foot up, balance!”

It is true that both strength and flexibility are skills that the Order expects all of their recruits to master. And it is true that some of the positions, especially when performed by attractive people not wearing a lot of clothing are, and Kylo’s trying his best to not notice this, _extremely_ nice to look at. And it is also true that if you are not holding the position correctly that the benefit offered by getting into it becomes non-existent, and you might hurt yourself.

He’s held every form he’s watching these women go through, and he was bad at all of them when he started, but Luke _never_ felt the need to rub that much of himself against him when correcting his form. In fact, if he remembers correctly, in most cases, it shouldn’t take more than a hand or two, and those hands do not usually need to be anywhere near where Tomlinson’s hands are, to get a person into the right position to gather the benefit of the exercise.

Kylo mentally glares daggers at the man, displeased to have been proven right in his suspicion of why he’s wearing no armor. Can’t rub his shaft against them if he’s in his armor. Can’t leer at them if his face is hidden.

 

* * *

“You enjoy this job, don’t you?” Kylo asks as Tomlinson takes him around the center, showing him the ‘facility.’

He doesn’t know how many of the other trainers, some of whom have numbers and are not molesting the ladies, though they may be battering them, and the others of which have names, and roving hands, thighs, and shafts, were hand-picked by Tomlinson to join him here, but enough of them are following his manners that it doesn’t matter if they were picked or not.

“Best day of my life was when you opened up recruiting to slaves. This level of basic training, it used to just be children, and…” Kylo supposes that it’s a good thing he wasn’t molesting the children, too. “They’re so desperate to get away, they’re willing to do anything to make you happy,” There’s a wide leer in that sentence.

“I’d imagine.” Kylo’s voice is beyond icy and down to absolute zero. “I’d like you to write up your training technique, and bring your trainers, and your most promising troops to the _Supremacy_ in four days. We’re having a conference on how to most effectively utilize all of the skills of our newest recruits. And…” he feels the lie almost pause on his lips, but if he’s going to get this to work… “proper training relies upon _satisfied_ trainers with high morale, so when you write it up and demonstrate it, I want you to _be specific_ as to your methods.” Between Tomlinson’s own lust, and Kylo’s Force, he knows that when it’s time to demonstrate, the rest of his trainers will have a show to see.

Tomlinson looks at him with another leer, and then looks over the combat class in front of them. Again, Kylo would prefer to not notice this, but hand to hand performed by sweaty women who aren’t wearing a lot of clothing is also awfully nice to watch.  “I will do that.” He checks the chronometer on the wall, glances at Kylo, sees Kylo _watching_ , and says, “It’s getting late. We can accommodate you if you’d like to stay. The food is good, and the company excellent.”

“I’m not staying.”

Tomlinson is confused by that, and Kylo can feel that he often has visitors who come to partake of the ‘hospitality.’ “Oh. Your loss. A lot of them love you, and would probably be all over showing you their appreciation.”

Kylo doesn’t visibly react to that, but… He can feel it’s true. Enough. Love would be an outright lie, but… For most of them, he likely _would_ be welcome in their bed. Some would see it as a way to show appreciation. Some as a way to rise to a higher station. Some as just a change of pace. And some have been looking at him, their eyes trailing over his body. And while he knows how to act about that, “Another time,” he says, turning to leave, he’s not sure what to _think_ about it.

“Count on it.”

 

 

* * *

The First Order may have done everything it could to turn humans into order-following droids, but even with the Hux method, it was beyond aware of the fact that the things in those uniforms were people, and people are biological units with _needs._

Snoke may have found those needs irksome, but he made sure they were met. People who have their needs met have a much easier time complying with other people’s wants. And, though Kylo’s shifted a lot of Snoke’s rules, these he’s kept in place.

Food: Not great, but always more than enough and _good,_ meaning both nutritious and tasty _._ Hungry soldiers don’t follow orders well. Their alliance ends up being to their stomachs before their masters, so Snoke made sure they were _never_ hungry.

Rest: The beds are comfortable and the dwellings they’re in are snug. There’s enough down time between shifts to make sure that the troops can rest. Sleeping pills are available to anyone who wants them. Tired soldiers make mistakes, and yes, sometimes being tired is unavoidable, but if it can be avoided, it is.

Medical care: That’s one area Snoke was willing to _pour_ money. They’ve got beyond top of the line care. Sick soldiers can’t work, and with most of his empire on ships, any contagion could rampage through his men if he wasn’t careful about health vectors.

Sex: The Jedi may have been attempting to produce asexual or barely sexual monks. Snoke wasn’t. His soldiers could fraternize as they liked with each other, and every permanent settlement, ship, and outpost with more than a hundred people on it has pleasure specialists to cater to pretty much every taste. The only change Kylo made to that was he started hiring their specialists, instead of just grabbing them.

On his ship, hurtling away from Myrtuum Ping, he double checks. There are people whose entire job is to take care of horny idiots like Tomlinson stationed at Myrtuum Ping. He’s apparently paying five of them rather well to do just that. And… It’s a market town. Apparently, there’s an entire district filled with nothing but people who take care of the physical needs of anyone with enough credits to buy an hour or so of their time.

The man isn’t desperate, he’s just a fucking asshole, and he’s going to pay for it.

 

 

* * *

“I take it today was better?” Rey asks as they eat. It’s clear that he’s not nearly as shaken as he was yesterday.

“It was different.”

She touches his hand, and gets a feel for _different._ He feels her rage spike in a way his didn’t. He’d been, disgusted, probably the best word for it, but not the red hot core of anger he felt at Hidiri.

She’s got enough anger for both of them. “You’re going to kill this one, too.”

“I was planning on it.” That was a forgone conclusion, though he’s more excited, and interested in killing RW-5879.

“Make it hurt.” Her voice is savage and he can feel her pleasure at the idea.

“I can do that.”

 

 

* * *

6/11/1

 

Rey’s sleeping. He’s still awake.

And has been for hours. He gets up, and pulls his clothing back on, it’s too cold to be roaming about naked, and he doesn’t want to take the blankets away from Rey.

He crosses into her main room, and looks at the door, and… While there’s some appeal to the idea of her chapel, it’s just too damn cold outside for it. He doesn’t have his cloak or cowl and freezing his ass off in her dome isn’t his idea of a good way to settle his mind.

Instead he settles himself in their armchair, legs crossed, getting comfortable, eyes closing, and lets himself _think_ about everything that’s clamoring around in his head.

Eventually, he gets to the problem. It’s not going to be enough to just execute these people after they demonstrate what he _doesn’t_ want them doing. He can’t just tell his trainers, “Don’t do this.” Especially RW-5879’s method. That’s the only thing three quarters of his trainers know how to do.

He’s got to give them a map of what to do, how to do it, and…

He doesn’t exactly enjoy thinking too hard about his own training with Luke, but, it worked. As well as it could with him. And sense of shame and fish out of water aside, it was humane. He was, undoubtedly, Luke’s worst failure, or worst student, or… least capable of absorbing the lessons he was supposed to master, but Luke never screamed at him, never physically hurt him, never… Did anything other than fear him and be disappointed. And… if he hadn’t blocked the blow, Luke would have killed him clean and fast. He wasn’t there to hurt Ben, just end him. (Kylo’s not sure if that’s mercy or not.)

Granted, fear and disappointment aren’t exactly easy to carry, not when the scared, disappointed person matters to you, but…

“I wasn’t just disappointed in you.” The voice is so familiar Kylo jerks at it, a wave of fear and shame pouring over him, pulling him into a defensive posture before he can even get his eyes open. Then he opens his eyes to the blue glow of Luke in Rey’s living room. He’s leaning back against her workbench, looking down at Kylo. Pretty much the only way he _can_ look down at Kylo now.

 

 

For a few more heartbeats there’s a thrill of fear and shame through Kylo, but Luke just stands there, looking at him, old and weary. The ghost is long beyond hurting him, long beyond having an opinion that should matter. Kylo slowly relaxes back into the chair, his rational mind aware of the fact that he _can’t_ attack or defend, the twenty-two-year-old boy in the back of his head still on high alert, ready to leap at a moment’s notice.

Luke nods, apparently pleased that Kylo’s willing to sit. “I was Luke Skywalker, hero of the galaxy, destroyer of the Empire, the only living Jedi Master, and I couldn’t lead a hurting eight-year-old out of his own dark. And you caught that, felt it, but didn’t have a map of how it worked, so figured it was about you.”

“It was about _me_ ,” Kylo snaps. “You weren’t pining away having an existential crisis over M’Gll.”

“My failure with you, not _you_.”

Kylo eyes him, snorts in inelegant dismissal, and shakes his head. “You’ve had a long time to tell yourself self-serving lies about that.”

Luke looks right back at him. “So have you.”

“You were afraid of me.”

“Yes.” And it’s clear that Luke was, but he’s not, now. “Afraid of you as you, and you as the one who would pull my mask off.”

“What mask?” Most of Kylo’s memories of Luke involve a painfully, eternally, _earnest_ face. Earnestly pleased, earnestly disappointed, earnestly confounded, but always, _earnest._

Luke stares at him, eyes open, very open, and says, quietly, “You’re what… thirty, thirty-one now?”

“Something like that.” Since he’s gotten out of the habit of thinking in BBY-ABY years, he’s actually not entirely sure how old he is today, because he’s not sure what _today_ is. Not thirty-two, that’ll happen after they get to Y.O. 2.

“Feel like you aren’t smart enough, wise enough, experienced enough to do this _thing_ dropped on your shoulders? This thing everyone else depends on you to do, do right, and then, somehow, when you do it, everything will get _better._ ” Kylo blinks at that. “Feel like everyone who matters depends on you to somehow be able to do this thing that you’re not only not suited for, but you don’t actually know how to do? So you’re desperately faking it, doing the best you can, hoping they don’t figure it out?” Luke nods, slowly. “Oh, you do. Good. Now toss a kid who’s the living embodiment of showing the entire universe that you’re not who you claim to be into the mix. And he’s your sister’s only child, and she’s looking at you like the entire universe depends on you being able to help him, because you’re the _only one_ who could possibly do it. And your best friend, the man who saved your life more times than you can count, he’s begging you not to screw it up, because he’s sure this _isn’t_ the way to do it. Toss all of that onto your plate. Now, just to make it more interesting, the kid can feel your emotions, and is actively looking for any hint that you are not _constantly delighted_ with him and everything he does, and if he ever gets that hint, he spirals into a snit of self-loathing, and flares out hard enough with the Force that everyone near him gets depressed and angry, too. Give that a try. It’ll be _fun._ ”

Kylo can’t help it. He snorts a laugh. Genuinely starting to relax, after all, there are good memories of time with Luke in there, too. And… at least right now, he’s having an easier time feeling them. “Rey wasn’t kidding, you got _sarcastic._ ”

“Like you said, I had a _long_ time.”

“So… You here to be deep and wise and experienced now that you’ve had your long time?”

“I could be. Or maybe, like Yoda, I’m just here to annoy you and remind you that the world won’t end if you don’t get it right.”

Kylo huffs. “There. Is that annoyed enough?”

Luke smirks. “Probably not. You aren’t even thinking of cursing, yet.”

“Kriff,” Kylo says, utterly deadpan.

“Please, you didn’t think that was cursing back when you were ten.”

“You did.”

They both remember Luke glaring at him when he said that, frustrated at some lesson going sideways. Ben got into a snit because it was _barely_ a bad word, the kind of word Han might say when he was mildly irked, and Luke getting strict because it was _rude_.

Luke smirks. “You know, this part of it is fun. I should get a walking stick.”

Kylo just looks at him, not getting that.

Luke shakes his head, not about to share Yoda bonking him in the head with his staff. “It won’t, you know.”

Kylo raises an eyebrow.

“The universe won’t end if you fail.”

“But I will. They’ll kill me if I fuck this up too badly.”

Luke rolls his eyes. “Look, I know it’s not your fault you don’t have any middle gears. You come from people with no middle gears, who wouldn’t have known a middle gear if they tripped over it, but try to at least imagine what they might look like.”

Kylo just stares at Luke, feeling annoyed.

“Not everything is a life or death struggle. And even if it is, you’ve got what most people would call extenuating circumstances.”

Kylo raises an eyebrow. He probably would have gotten along better with Luke if he’d been this snarky when he was alive. Of course, from the feel of it, Luke had to embrace some of his own dark before he could get this snarky.

“I know you read every history of the Jedi I could find. You devoured them. Every hero. Every great knight. You knew them all by name. So, tell me, Kylo-who-used-to-be-smarter-than-this-when-he-was-Ben, how many of them could freeze blaster shots and _teleport?_ ”

Kylo blinks at that, too. Luke smirks. “Don’t be stupid, and you can fail without having to die for it. The Force has given you an out. Take it if you need it. And then start over.

“Your father ever tell you why he had those dice bronzed?”

Kylo’s not following that leap. “Uh… No… They were his luck.”

“They were _rigged_. He had them weighted so he couldn’t lose with them. He bronzed them so he didn’t have to roll them again. The Force gave you a set of rigged dice, use them if you need them.”

And then Luke’s gone.

And Kylo’s not any closer to a plan for how to train people, but he’s more settled about putting whatever it is into place.

 

 

* * *

6/12/1

 

Needs… Take care of their needs and they’ll take care of his wants.

What do they _need?_

Food, clothing, medical care, a place to sleep, someone or thing to fuck if they get too randy. He’s got that covered.

But that’s not why they’re joining him. They’d be staying if that’s what they needed. He’s giving them that, and they’re running away in droves.

What do they _need?_

_A better life._

And what’s that…

He’s at his desk, looking at half a dozen datapads filled with reports on the Hux method, and what the Imperials used to use and from even before that, when the Senate built a Clone Army.

Reading through all of them, he’s noticing that the Hux method, for all he loathes it, not only had the highest kill rate, but for people who survived it, the highest morale reports, too.

What did Hux give them the Empire didn’t?

 

 

* * *

He dreams of Tash M’Gll.

It’s a mix of their first fight, young, thirteen, she’s two inches taller than he is, but he’s stronger, and they’re fairly equally matched, and their last one, older, twenty-two, almost twenty-three, he’s more than a head taller now, and he’s on fire and she’s ice, and both of them are flaring, glowing, dark and light, each pulled to their own side of the Force, and she’s swinging, controlled and steady, and he’s storming, wild and frenzied.

He felt it the moment she realized she was going to lose the fight.

She knew it, arms up, blocking his saber, her green to his blue, but he’s stronger, and he’s forcing her blade down, toward her own neck. Jedi fight stance is all about arm strength, supposedly the Force, too, but… they’re equally matched in the Force, and he weighs almost twice as much as she does.

She knew he’d win, and he felt her peace at it.

If she died defending what mattered, then that was that. The Force would take care of her spirit when her body was done. After all, she’d given it everything she could.

He wakes with a jerk.

Hux gave them a cause. That’s what Luke could do for M’Gll, too.

And that’s what he’s got to give them. Not just material needs. He’s got to give them a _cause_. That’s why they join. His idea of citizenship and belonging and controlling their destinies is a start, but it’s not married into his training techniques.

He’s got to not just give them the idea, he’s got to keep reminding them of it. He’s got to build toward it. He’s got to give them meaning, and the tools to defend it.

 

 

* * *

6/13/1

 

C8 isn’t surprised when Kylo asks it to hunt down civics textbooks from Naboo and Alderaan, because it can’t be, but it does indicate that Alderaan may be a trifle difficult to find surviving textbooks from.

“I don’t care if it takes a while, find them. Old Imperial textbooks, from the days the Senate was still running. Any other democratic republic… Something that covers the ideals of how it’s supposed to work. Not necessarily how it did, just how it was supposed to.”

C8 doesn’t sigh, but Kylo’s got the sense it wants to.

 

* * *

There are 27,982 training officers among the Order.

And _all_ of them are on _The Supremacy._ It’s the first time he’s been pleased to not be at full capacity here, because if he were, they’d be bunking in their ships or sleeping in the hallways.

But he’s got the space, so they’re here.

For this, right here, right now.

The first four hours are an intense, in-depth seminar of how RW-5879 and Captain Tomlinson do their jobs. _No_ detail has been spared. He doesn’t say anything, just watches. Most of them are watching the trainers with laser focus, and some of them are taking notes.

He gets the sense from a good number of the Imperials that this _annoys_ them. This pleases him.

He can feel that too many Hux grads consider this unnecessary. They already know how to do this, and _are_ doing it. That’s dismaying on several levels, not the least of which is that he’s going to have to figure out how to retrain them.

After that, hands on lessons. RW-5879 goes first, and Kylo watches impassively as he lines up a collection of teenagers, ready to show off their skills with vibroblades.

Kylo puts a stop to it once the teens are lined up. “RW-5879, sub in your training officers. Let’s have the _professionals_ demonstrate how this works.”

The training officers aren’t pleased by this, but they _follow orders_ so they fall in and the teenagers step aside. Frakes takes charge of them, moving them to a decent vantage point from where they can watch what’s coming next.

RW-5879 goes through the drill, including dislocating the shoulder of one of the trainers who doesn’t, quite, get his… her blade up fast enough. Followed by backhanding the trainer, hard, when he… she… no way to tell what’s under the armor, snaps the joint back into place. “I did not give you permission to fix that.”

“Yes, sir!” Kylo’s guts lurch when he… she… _lets_ RW-5879 dislocate the shoulder, again, and then stomp his/her knee.

The drill ends, with the soldier standing, all weight on one foot, and from what Kylo can feel, rapidly slipping into shock. He glances to Frakes, and as soon as the demonstration is over, he weeds the soldier out of the line, and gingerly offers assistance getting him/her to the medbay.

Kylo would have preferred having Tomlinson demonstrate on his trainers, but he’s sure that if he does that, he’ll just get a perfectly competent flexibility class.

“Captain Tomlinson, demonstrate, please.”

So, Tomlinson has his “best” class in front of them, and his metric for best appears to be most conventionally attractive. They’re very pretty girls. Young. Not quite sub-adults, but not exactly adults, either. Younger than Rey, but not adolescents.

And, seeing the way they watched RW-5879 give his demonstration, Tomlinson is more than willing to show off all of his “technique” as well.

He’s pointing out how this is good for officer morale, giving no indication at all that the woman he’s rubbing against is a person trying to learn a skill.

Kylo watches, eyes impassive.

He watches as other training officers ask questions. He especially pays attention to the ones who seem to be planning on how to incorporate these particular ‘morale boosting’ techniques into their own roster.

He doesn’t know if he should be relieved that many of the Hux grads consider the need for ‘morale boosting’ of any sort to be a sign of ineptitude and weakness. If they were in charge, Tomlinson and his cohort would be _purged._ He’s not sure how he feels about how the Hux grads will respond to what he’s about to do.

At the end of the demonstration he says, “Captain Tomlinson… that was an amazingly informative demonstration of correct balance posing.” Kylo crooks a finger, pulling the man forward.

He looks both pleased with himself at Kylo’s words and somewhat disconcerted by the feel of the Force pulling him to Kylo.

Pleased vanishes when Kylo lights his saber, red flame flicking out, hot and wicked, and before Tomlinson even has a chance to slip from confused to afraid, he’s flashed out with it, driving it straight up and through his genitals.

He feels every man witnessing this cringe in a protective crouch at where he strikes Tomlinson, and how he holds the blade there, twisting it, pulling out a little once, and then forcing it deeper through his body, tip of his blade visible through his back. Then he extinguishes the blade and Tomlinson collapses. He debates leaving him on the floor, still alive and screaming, so damaged he can’t even clutch at himself, but decides that he’s already hammered the lesson home. A quick flick of his wrist snaps Tomlinson’s neck.

The ladies he was training are too stunned to cheer, but he can feel a bloodthirsty pleasure through most of them. One or two are dismayed because Tomlinson was easy to manipulate, and they could use him to their ends. But, for the most part, the only thing about this they didn’t like was that he chose to break Tomlinson’s neck. Many of them would have taken him to the medbay, fixed him up, as much as he could be, and then left him in the middle of nowhere an unsexed wreck with no bladder or bowel control.

He looks to RW-5879, and he smiles. It’s the coldest, scariest gesture he’s ever used, and RW-5879’s knees buckle at it.

“Come train with me, Commander RW-5879. I’d like to test the efficiency of your technique.”

Twenty-seven thousand plus training officers are _completely_ focused on what they’re seeing, silent, still, halfway between horrified and fascinated.

RW-5879 takes a half step forward, fear a palpable cloud around him, and Kylo can feel him cringe behind his helmet when Kylo tosses him his lightsaber, blade off. He catches it, wouldn’t do to let the Master’s weapon drop, but it’s clear he doesn’t want to be holding it.

“Have you ever used a lightsaber before, RW-5879?”

“No, sir.”

Kylo smiles at him again, and again the expression is terrifying. “Excellent, this will be a good learning experience.” He uses the Force to trigger the blade and watches RW-5879 drop it in surprise. He stops its fall and brings it back up to RW-5879 hand. “Don’t drop it.”

He takes it with a shaking hand.

“It’s a one-and-a-half handed weapon, meaning you should be able to wield it one or two handed, depending on the situation. Much like a baton.”

Kylo ignites the black light short sword, and jumps forward, taking a good hard swing at RW-5879, who brings the red saber up, fast, clutched in both hands. He’s trained with all of the Order’s martial weapons, so he should at least have some decent instincts for this. Among other things he can’t see the black blade, but his instincts are good enough that he knows he’s being attacked, and he’s following the line of the hilt.

“Good. Two-handed is usually good for any sort of defensive maneuver.”

Then Kylo sweeps down, fast, taking RW-5879’s right leg off at the knee. “It’s a good plan to crouch some, keep the blade low, you want to defend your whole body.”

RW-5879’s curled into a ball in the floor, clutching at the stump of his leg, moaning.

“You hit them when they break formation.” He kicks him hard in ribs, using his Force to multiply the force of the hit, feeling the armor shatter under his boot, and ribs crack below.  “Stand, Commander RW-5879, the lesson is not over.”

RW-5879 can’t stand, so Kylo stands him up using the Force, and then raises the saber, hovering it at hand height. “Take the blade. It’s time to _learn._ ”

“Please! Stop! Please!” He’s begging through his tears and moans, trying to kneel before Kylo, but he won’t let him sink to the floor.

“Take the saber, RW-5879.”

“Please, please, please, Master Ren, please,” his voice is ragged, breathing hard.

Kylo nudges his hand with the hilt of his saber, and he loosely closes his fingers around it.

Kylo slashes out fast, taking that hand off at the wrist. He keeps the saber floating. “ _Both_ hands, Commander RW-5879, we are not yet working on attack strokes, where you’d use one hand.”

RW-5879’s hanging in Kylo’s Force grasp, wailing, no intelligible sounds coming from him, just a long, tearing scream of inarticulate pain.

Kylo shakes his head, acting disgusted, “It’s been less than a minute, Commander RW-5879. Do you really think this is good enough?”

He’s sobbing, and looses his bladder and bowel.

“Well, that was utterly unnecessary. You haven’t, _yet,_ lost anything that can’t be replaced.”

RW-5879 sobs.

“Are you finding fear and pain to not be suitably motivating? Are you not _scared_ enough yet to do everything perfect? _Pick up the blade._ Two hands.”

“I…” more sobbing, gasped breaths, snotty, liquid-y sounds burbling out from behind the mask. “can’t.”

“Obviously, I have not yet applied enough fear or pain. Anything is possible with enough fear and pain, no? That’s the standard you’ve set. Scare them enough, hurt them enough, and they’ll learn or die.

“Take off your mask.”

RW-5879 fumbles uselessly at it. Unable to make his hand do what he needs it to.

“That’s a simple task.” He slashes at RW-5879’s arm. Enough to scorch his armor, not enough to take his functional arm off. “Do it _right._ ”

Eventually the mask clatters to the floor.

“Good. Look at me.”

Swollen, red eyes stare at him out of a chalk white face.

“Do I appear to approve of your training technique?” Kylo asks through clenched teeth.

“No…” shudders out of almost white lips.

Kylo calls his saber back to him. He extinguishes the black blade, and tucks it back into his belt. Then in one fast turn he takes RW-5879’s head clean off, allowing him to drop to the floor.

Kylo turns to his assorted trainers. He looks at the corpses who’ve just given demonstrations. He holds the beat, waiting, making sure what he says next _really_ sinks in.

 

 

He rests his foot on what used to be RW-5879’s head. Then he again turns to everyone surrounding him. “If any of you ever use any training method demonstrated in the last six hours, I will personally find you and use it on you, _with a lightsaber._

“If I run into even a whisper of a rumor that you are taking advantage of any of the trainees to satisfy _any_ non-Order need you may have, you best be better at hiding than I am at seeking.

“These are our future soldiers and citizens, they are not your playthings nor are they your slaves.

“Your job is to make sure they can function as soldiers and citizens. This is difficult. I understand that. But I do not need a multitude of mindless drones capable of only following orders. If I _wanted_ that, I would _buy_ it. They make droids for a reason, and these are not _droids._

“In the next few weeks, we will be issuing you with a new curricula for training soldiers. If you cannot train soldiers without terrorizing, torturing, or molesting them, it is time to give up your job. If you’ve got your five years in, I will accept your resignation, and you will leave with full benefits and no prejudice. If you do not, it’s time to seek a transfer to a unit where you can function without tormenting anyone.”

He looks down at the head under his foot, and then kicks it to the ships. “These men were _filth_ , unworthy of our uniform, and you will _not_ emulate them. Understood?”

He gets a lot of silent nods and shocked looks.

“You are dismissed. I will be watching how you go from here.”

 

 

* * *

Rumors spread like wildfire that Kylo Ren, Master of the Order, personally unsexed the man who was taking advantage of his trainees, and then cut off the leg, hand, and finally, head of the man who was too hard on the children he trained.

And while it’s true that adherence to the official Order standards does begin to lag some, morale among the new recruits _shoots_ up and stays there every quarter thereafter.

And, as the months go by, the number of Order members grows, and _keeps_ growing.

 

 


	35. Be Wary of Old Men

6/15/1

 

“Well… that was…” Admiral Schiff says, blinking as he ambles away from the Master’s training display.

“Yes, yes indeed it was,” General Ritter, replies, nodding.

General Kinear adds, “When we decided he needed to know about this, I can’t say I was expecting him to be subtle—“

“No…” Schiff replies. _Subtle_ they certainly hadn’t expected.

“But…” Public maiming followed by a decapitation were a level of _not subtle_ Ritter hadn’t expected.

“Indeed,” Kinear says.

They walk a few paces. Apparently, those rumors about Darth Tantrum may have not been as exaggerated as Kinear hoped. They all knew he had a destructive bent, and they knew he'd personally dispatched a quarter of the general counsel along with Hux back when he took over, but… that public display... and  _that..._ with the lightsaber... and... Kinear shudders thinking about it. He didn't throw up, but a few of the men further back,  _did._

“I’d say that particular issue is mostly handled then?” Schiff says.

“Mostly. Did you watch how Hux grads responded to that?” Kinear replies.

The other two nod. “If we don’t… do something… with them, they’ll eventually revolt,” Ritter says.

“I didn’t think they had enough brains left, but… cognitive dissonance… That’s the term right?” Schiff adds.

“That’s the term. Follow any and all orders is warring with orders that are odds with how they were trained to do things. If they allow weakness, they’re betraying the Order. If they eradicate it, they’re betraying the Master,” Kinear says.

“There has to be something we can do with that, right?” Ritter asks.

“Something. There’s always _something._ If we’ll have enough of a training corps left to keep going after is going to be the question,” Schiff says.

“No. We’ve got to find a way to keep them, just… nudge them into a more… complimentary direction. And make sure none of them rise up as a new Supreme Leader,” Kinear says.

“They’d defect in droves if _anyone_ could credibly claim that mantle,” Ritter adds, naming the biggest threat any of them have anticipated.

“He knows that we’re… culling the herd. Maybe we don’t need to wait for his next trip off the ship to weed out more undesirables,” Kinear says.

“It’s better if he’s not here when it happens. If we get caught or… worse, mess it up too badly, he can retake it from the outside, claim he didn’t know.” Ritter smirks, then turns to look in the direction of the afternoon’s “demonstration.” “After all, who would believe that he’s capable of subtly weeding out the men who don’t belong here?”

“No one, not after today,” Schiff replies. He glances at his compatriots. “You’re making sure the _right_ people catch wind of what happened?”

“Of course,” Kinear replies. “I don’t know about the vipers in our bosom, but I’m making sure the threats outside stay calm.”

“Good.” Ritter says and Schiff nods.

“Have you gotten a look at the ‘new curriculum?’” Kinear asks.

They both shake their heads. “Gods alone know what something out of the mind of a Jedi-trained, Vader-worshipping, child of the New-Republic is going to look like, probably a lot about service and good citizenship,” Ritter says.

“Possibly with a heavy emphasis on the use of power or force to protect that which we’re building?” Schiff adds. “That’s right out of the Empire’s playbook. Citizenship as a badge of honor only granted to the truly _worthy._ Blend in the idea of duty to the Order and a mission to extend its benevolence to all who wish to join…”

That’s got all three of them nodding, and thinking _that’s_ the sort of thing the can start wafting toward the Hux grads to help shape them in a more amenable direction. Set it up as only the worthy wish to join _and_ can stick it out…

Ritter adds, “As long as he feels good about the content of what he’s offering them, and we control the mechanism for tallying the votes when the time comes, it’s all good.”

Kinear and Schiff both, almost invisibly, stiffen when Ritter says that.

“Don’t ever let yourself even think of anything around that when you’re near him,” Kinear adds.

“Of course not.” Ritter replies, and Schiff and Kinear glance at each other.

“Did I tell you I watched Vader Force choke a man once?” Kinear says.

“No,” Ritter answers, getting the message.

“It wasn’t a pretty sight, but… I have a feeling that what we just saw may have been a tad more… intimidating… than that.”

“Why did he do it?” Schiff asks, making sure to fully hammer home the idea for Ritter.

“Some idiot questioned the power of the Force in front of him.”

The two generals and one admiral all share a look.

“Ah…” Ritter says.

“And no one questioned the power of the Force after that,” Schiff says.

“Not in my hearing, no,” Kinear replies. “Granted, the Hutts got rambunctious within a few hours of that moment, and I never saw Vader again.” Schiff knows that’s the excuse Kinear used to get as far away from the Death Star and what he could tell was about to go as pear shaped as possible. (Kinear only has a few rules, but when people start cackling about having ultimate power or ultimate weapons or anything along those lines, he skedaddles, because the universe seems to delight in proving them wrong.)

Ritter doesn’t.

“It’s occurring to me that it may be even more valuable to have no one questioning the power of our Master,” Ritter says.

“For the sake of our long-term and continued careers, I’d say so,” Kinear replies.

 

 

* * *

Two days later, when Kinear and Schiff get a moment alone, they share a look. No words need to be spoken, but Ritter goes on the list.

It’s not that he’s wrong about who controls the counting of the votes when the time comes. _That’s_ always been the mechanism for any successful democratic republic. Anyone can run. Anyone can vote. In the hands of an amateur, only the political pets win. That’s garish and easily tracked, and, within a decade or so, results in a rebellion.

In the hands of the masters… And Kinear and Schiff are masters… The “people” pick their candidates. Those candidates will, often, behind the scenes, have been handpicked by the masters, and they will offer a range of political opinions that satisfy almost any desires, and, more importantly maintain the power of the masters. And those already hand-picked candidates will often go up against each other, with great shows of vitriol and fantastical outrage about how the other side is a pack of monsters, though their policies won’t be all that different from each other. Both sides will have a set of priorities and opinions that will, broadly speaking, benefit the masters, and the masters will not care who wins.

Some, genuine, outside-the-bounds candidates will be allowed. And in close races the master’s pick will win. And should the outsider ever get a lead of more than five or so points, he will win.

In the hands of masters, the will of the people isn’t subverted, it’s just… nudged. Even illiterate peasants know something is up when only the party of the Masters win elections by huge margins. But if the candidate most beneficial to the Masters wins by a point or two… Well, that’s just how elections work. And if some candidates who are actively hostile to the Masters win, well, that’s the will of the people, no? That just shows that the system works and that it’s clean.

Everyone gets the representation they want. People get to feel virtuous for joining and defending their own team. They get villains to hate and heroes to adore. And the Masters, they stay the Masters, forever.

It worked for more than a thousand years in the hands of the Old Republic, until someone decided he wanted all the power, and didn’t care if everyone knew he was the one pulling all the strings.

There’s no formal laws set, not yet, for how the Senate of the Order will comport itself, but whatever number is necessary to get what they want done, they will have exactly one more member than necessary to do it. After all, there’s no purpose to wasting their time and energy getting more than that, and the more active and visible the ‘outsiders’ are, the more legitimate the elections look.

And if they occasionally lose a point or law… They lose. That makes their hold on the mechanism that much more invisible. They won’t lose on the big things, and that’s what matters.

So, no the problem isn’t that the future Senate of the Order won’t be quite as democratic as advertised. It will be _perfectly_ democratic, just with a well-curated list of available choices. It’s that Ritter was willing to say it out loud. Even among them, there are some things that _cannot_ ever be said. And when your Master reads minds, if you don’t have the discipline to not _say_ things, you certainly don’t have it to not _think_ them.

 

 

* * *

Three weeks later, Kinear gives an awfully good speech at Ritter’s funeral. (Which even the Master attends, though he doesn’t look comfortable doing it.) He speaks with great sincerity about how Ritter was one of a kind, how much he loved working with him, and how difficult he’ll be to replace. And he’s sincere because all of those things are true. (He’s also sincere, and careful about how he’s sincere, because the Master is in attendance. There’s not even the hint of a single stray thought of anything other than pain at the loss of a good friend in Kinear’s mind. Of course, that is also true. Kinear will miss Ritter, and often long for his counsel in the days and weeks to come.)

Schiff offers up a rousing toast at his wake (Which the Master does not attend. If he drinks alcohol, none of them have ever seen it, so parties centered on getting drunk do not appear to be his idea of a good time.), full of spirit and regret for a lost friend. By the time he’s done, he’s crying, as is most of the rest of the party. It’s absolutely true that he regrets the loss of Ritter. They both do. The tears are real.

Ritter was a good man, a stable man, one who could be relied upon to get the job done. He just wasn’t properly discreet. And in the game they’re playing, discretion trumps everything else.

They send him off to the stars with full honors, drink toasts to his memory, send his widow flowers, and begin scouring the lists, looking for a suitable replacement.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Like I said before, when you look at Kinear, think Don Corleone or Tywin Lannister.


	36. Of Darkness, Light, and Evil

7/3/1

  

“Rey…”

Rey blinks, it’s late, she was asleep, and when she hears her name in the night, she expects it to come from Kylo’s voice, but that’s not Kylo. That’s Poe’s voice coming from her comm.

“Poe, what?” She stumbles out of her room, not wanting to wake Kylo, wrapping up in her robe, and then grabbing the black blanket from the top of her bed to wrap around the robe. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing bad. This is the first chance I’ve gotten to give you a heads up. I’ve got a family coming.”

He must be able to feel her puzzled look. They’ve got a few families here. And he’s never felt the need to give her a warning about it.

“Not that kind. You know, with _parents._ ”

That gets a blink out of Rey. “Parents?” Right. In the real world, children usually have _parents._ That’s a thing that happens for most people. Just… not most of the people she sees.

“Yeah. Chewie and I were talking to the guy who sells the microfarms. He wants to know what we’re doing, so I explain the school and the Maji and… Let me back up, Grandma and Grandpa were both raised in the Church of the Force. Not Jedi, but members. It fell apart. When they were adults, Palpatine began the pogroms. Mom and Dad were babies, but like a lot of little not-quite-Jedi, they were raised in an underground Church of the Force. That’s how they met, part of the same community.

“So, they’re _really_ interested in what we’re up to, and then it comes out they’ve got a kid. A Force sensitive kid they’ve been trying to raise as a Jedi based on what they remember, but… it’s only bits and pieces and a half dozen holy books they can’t really read and…” Poe’s voice goes even lower. “So, I’m all on top of meeting the kid, but… He’s _dark._ Even I can feel it. It’s like a cloud around him. Kid’s sharp and sarcastic and angry and… He’s _dark._ I don’t think he’s evil, not yet, but… I can _really_ feel it. He’s projecting it all over and… Anyway. Mom and Dad want him to turn into some Jedi, and they’re coming, all three of them, to talk to you.

“If you can convince them, they’ll stay. We’ll get the microfarms, and the people who know how to use them, set them up right, build more of them, and the kid.”

Rey sighs low and deep. That’s… heady. And… a _lot_ to deal with.

“When are you due?”

“We’re still a day and a half out, so…”

“Okay. Good. Thanks for the heads up.”

She feels the smile in his voice. “I’m not gonna let you go into this blind.”

 

 

* * *

She snuggles back in, next to Kylo. He’s in deep sleep, a large, warm log right now. His sleep rubs off on her, or maybe she’s just tired.

She dreams of a small, thin boy, with wild black hair, and wilder, darker eyes, cringing away from the fear he feels aimed at him by his classmates and teacher. 

She wonders who that boy could have become if someone could have embraced his dark, embraced him for his dark, and guided him towards ways to use it constructively.

 

 

* * *

“Welcome to Lirium,” Poe says to Millie, Rafe, and Critt Kenna. They’re in low orbit, coming down toward what Poe’s been thinking of as Majirium. (Though, because he thinks Majirium, Lirium sounds stupid, he hasn’t _said_ that to anyone.)

 

 

Critt’s watching the settlement with wide green eyes, his dark-skinned face lit up with interest. For a moment, but he’s fourteen and determined to make sure he never looks impressed by anything. “Small.” The look of interest shuts down, fast, and he forces a bored expression on his fine-boned face.

His mum, Millie, from whom he got the fine bones and green eyes, but not the dark skin, she’s much paler than both her husband and son, glares at him. “Be nice. We’re guests.”

Poe half inclines his head, and Chewie adds _Kid’s right. It’s small._

Rafe, Critt’s father, a large, dark-skinned man with black eyes and many braids of black hair, stares at the ground below them, rapidly getting closer and closer. “Good grassland.”

“Pretty much,” Poe says, though he honestly doesn’t know what exactly _good_ grassland is. He’s mostly just agreeing with the fact that that’s land, with grass on it.

“Is that snow?” Critt asks, again, making himself not be excited. He’s read about snow, but hasn’t ever seen it.

Poe’s looking at the much lighter than normal ground. “I think it’s just frost.”

“Winter’s not exactly the best time to be building microfarms,” Rafe says. “Frozen ground is great to build on, until it thaws, the plates shift, and you lose the seal keeping your microclimate intact.”

Poe shrugs. When he left the ground wasn’t frozen… much. “It might still be late autumn. We’re on the equator because we figured that’d mean the weather would stay pretty much the same year round. None of us realized that two suns means we get further away from one of them as we orbit, so the temperature drops,” At least, given how Lirium’s been moving and the weather’s been shifting, that’s their best guess of what’s going on.

“So, day and night of one of the suns stays the same, and the other gets longer and shorter?” Millie asks.

“Exactly. The blue one’s only in the sky a few hours a day now, because we’re rounding the green one. We’re guessing in about five months it’ll be gone from the sky completely. That’s likely when we’re in winter. Then spring, summer when we’re between the two of them, and autumn and winter again as we move away from the green one and round the blue.”

“Eight season year,” Millie says.

“Probably. And from the feel of it, it’ll probably take about nine or ten standard years to get all the way around,” Poe adds.

“So, if you don’t build now…” Rafe says.

Chewie howls and Poe translates, “We’re eating imported food for a long time.”

Millie glances at the lake; that’s getting closer by the moment. “That your water supply?”

“The main one. It rains, a _lot._ And we’ve been building some collection cisterns. Easier to treat water in them than from the lake.”

“What’s that?” Critt asks.

“The dome?” Poe asks back.

“Yeah.”

“That’s the chapel of the Maji.”

 _Home._ Chewie says, and Poe grins at him.

 

 

* * *

“How about you and Mr. Poe wander around? We’d like to talk to Ms. Rey,” Millie says to her son.

Critt rolls his eyes. “And what will we do once that thirty second adventure is over?”

“ _Critt,_ ” Rafe’s voice is tight. “We are _guests_ here.”

Critt snorts. “You’re the guest. I’m home.” He looks at Poe. “Okay, show me around. Do I get to build my own cottage, or do I have to live with _them?_ ”

Poe looks over his shoulder to Rey with a huge _I told you so_ look on his face.

 _You did._ She thinks back to him.

He startles a little, but then looks amused at her doing that.

 

* * *

Once Poe and Critt are out of earshot, Rey begins to lead the Kennas to her chapel, saying, “Poe tells me you were both raised as members of the Church of the Force.”

“Yes, and we’ve been trying to get it restarted since the fall of the Empire. Luke Skywalker even visited us twice. He had a padawan who wanted to join us when she finished her training, get us up and running the way we knew we could. Two years later, we had close to fifty members when Snoke got control of Aubrend, and outlawed it again.”

Rey wonders if M’Gll was the padawan in question.

“Are you still under the control of the Order?” that seems like a safe way to get to what she wants to know.

“As much as it attempts to control anything these days. We pay our taxes and there are Stormtroopers acting as police, but that’s it. We barely ever see them, these days,” Rafe says.

“So, you know it’s legal to start up the Church again? Did you try to find a Jedi?”

“We do, and did, but…” Millie’s shaking her head.

“Back in the day, they called Ren the Jedi Killer,” Rafe says, and Rey can feel the fear that there’s a monster going to hunt down their son. “None of us trusts he’s not waiting for the Church to come back just to make it easier for him to find them. And if there are any Jedi out there, they’re so far in hiding we couldn’t find them.”

Rey feels the anger and hate at Kylo, and the deep, unsettled distrust. She also feels shame, and two people _trying_ to beat that flash of hate into the dirt. Because members of the Church of the Force don’t do things like _hate._

But the Kennas do.

Critt likely comes by his dark naturally.

Rey open the panel that lets them into her chapel, and shows it off for a moment before saying, “Well, we’re not Jedi, and we’ve got no reason to think Kylo Ren is going to be showing up to kill us.”

“But you’re Force sensitive. I can feel that. A lot of the children here are, too,” Millie says.

“Yes. I am, and many of them are, but we offer our training to anyone who is here.” Rey nods to the symbol at her feet. The swirl of light and dark gray. “Most of the Jedi followed the path of the Living Force. The idea of the Force as something that’s in and of all living beings. They focused on the idea of light and dark and how to dedicate themselves to the light and eradicate not just the dark within themselves but in the world around them.

“We, here, are Maji, and we dedicate ourselves to the idea of the Unifying Force. The Force is in and of all things, living, not living, everything. It’s of time and space and the universe as a whole. It’s not just bound to living creatures. We don’t reject the idea of light and dark, but recognize them as concepts to describe aspects of the person wielding the Force. The Force itself is neither light nor dark, it just _is._ And we embrace all aspects of the people who come here to learn not just the Force, but the balance necessarily to live in this universe, and thrive in it.” Rey’d been thinking of this for the last two days, and that’s her best, _come join the Maji_ speech. 

The Kenna’s don’t look impressed. “So, that’s it, just let the dark be? Evil is a fact of life, it can’t be overcome, so don’t bother to fight?”

Rey looks at the floor beneath her feet, and then back to the mother and father in front of her. She wants their son. She can feel his power, and she’s sure that she’s meant to have him, to help shape him, but she can’t do that if she can’t convince them.

“The dark is a fact of life. It not only can’t, but shouldn’t, be overcome. But dark isn’t evil. They aren’t synonyms, and that’s part of what we’re here to work on, making sure we can find the line between the two. Find ways to embrace and use our dark for the betterment of ourselves and the galaxy.”

Millie says, “What do you mean dark isn’t evil? My parents grew up in the Church of the Force, and none of us were Jedi, but… They were very clear on this. The dark side wasn’t to be trifled with. Giving in to those dark feelings and emotions were the first step to being eternally dominated by evil.”

Rey nods. “They were very clear on that, and they were _wrong._ ”

“Tell that to everyone killed by Vader and Palpatine. That’s the dark side,” Rafe doesn’t look swayed by anything Rey’s said or about to say.

And Rey can feel it, so she concentrates, gets into that man’s head, gently looking for the edge she needs to get this idea across. “That’s the dark side used for evil. Your parents grew up in the Church of the Force, okay, what was the dark?”

Millie replies, “Pain, evil, hurting people and things.”

“That’s part of the problem,” Rey says, voice gentle, though she’s not feeling very gentle right now. “That’s the dark side explained by someone who had a few years of lessons as a child, lessons whittled down for young minds, stripped of nuance, and then remembered by someone who wasn’t paying much attention, who then added layers of history with people who were labeled ‘dark’ on top of it. I’ve got the books if you want to read them. The Maji is open for everyone, you, both of you, and your son, all of you can study here. And I have where you can start if you want, the works written by actual Jedi Masters about what it meant to be light or dark. Passion, attachment, fear, envy, anger… That’s the dark side. The dark, the real dark, it’s not about hurting people or evil, it’s about your emotions. It’s about those strong emotions that lead to strong action. The light side is about peace, contentment, knowledge, wisdom. But neither of them are the Force, not by themselves. The Force is through those things, transcends them, allows its disciples to use them but it _isn’t_ them.

“All of the old temples, and holy places, they were built on spots of intense light and dark feelings. By the time the Jedi were _the Jedi_ a lot of them thought that was an accident, or some sort of warning. But it’s not. It’s a reminder. The one doesn’t exist without the other. And in a vacuum of just light or just dark, nothing good happens. Nothing happens, period.”

She can feel that Millie’s at least familiar with the Jedi temples being in places of strong light and dark, and the idea that that was an accident doesn’t make sense to her.

“Dark is a tool, just like light. Dark allows for change, for bettering yourself, for moving forward. Light allows for healing, for knowledge, and contemplation. Dark gives you the power to change the world. Light gives you a plan to build the change you want to see. Dark allows you to hate injustice. Light gives you the compassion to forgive the injustices dealt you.” She looks out at her settlement. “I couldn’t have built this without light and dark. Dark lets you see what doesn’t work about the present. It lets you tear it down. It’s the desire for _more and better._ Light lets you feel where the end is. It’s that sense of how to put things together to build something new. They complement each other, and if you’ve got a handle on both of them, you can create anything.

“Vader and Palpatine only had the dark side of the game to play with, so they couldn’t build. Palpatine was probably the greatest political tactician of the last hundred years, and he wasted it on monster weapons to destroy systems. If he’d been even slightly more balanced with the light, he’d have gone down as one of the greatest rulers the galaxy had ever seen, but he didn’t have enough light to build off of what he’d conquered and destroyed. He could tear down, but not raise up, not enough.

“And Luke Skywalker, hero of the galaxy, one of the few truly _light_ people I’ve ever met, had enough light to create a new Jedi, enough light to dream big, and see a galaxy at peace and set putting that into motion, but he didn’t have enough dark to see what was wrong with the past and tear it down until it was too late, and someone with too much dark tore it down for him.”

“You sound like the Jedi were the enemy,” Millie says, back up, annoyed, feeling defensive. Nothing Luke Skywalker ever did or could do was wrong in Millie’s book. Just the idea of it makes her angry.

Rey makes herself focus on soft, gentle, soothing thoughts and feelings. She tries to project a sense of encouraging longing. Tries to make them feel like they want to be here. “I hope that’s not what you’re hearing. The Jedi were wrong. They were too static to change when change needed to happen. The Sith were wrong. They were too deeply entwined in their passions to see the larger picture or embrace peace. But it’s not about the enemy or our team or their team any of that. The Force is in and through all of us. Some of us have an easier time using it for fancy things, but none of us are without it.”

She watches Rafe and Millie turn around her chapel, sees them eyeing the floor and the tiny settlement. They can see their son talking with several other children, and Rey knows that half of them are also Force sensitive, and for the first time, ever, Critt doesn’t feel like a freak.

And his parents know him well enough to read his body language, even from this far away, and see that _he_ wants to stay.

“If you weren’t the last Jedi…” Rafe says, and Rey knows they’re staying, for a while, at least.

“Luke was the last Jedi. I’m the first Maji. I can teach your son to use and channel his power. I can teach him how I understand it, and where I think we need to go if we’re going to build a universe at peace. I can’t teach him to be a Jedi, because I have no interest in being one. I have some of the sacred books, and a lot of the commentaries on the sacred books, and even more commentaries on the commentaries, so I can let him read and learn on his own, and decide for himself what he wants to keep of the Jedi. Maybe he’s supposed to be the start of a new Jedi. Maybe he leans light enough to restart it. I don’t know.”

Actually, she does know, she can feel it in her bones, feel it in Critt’s bones, this child is utterly unsuited for the Jedi. But right now she’s telling his parents what they want to hear.

They both seem relieved at that idea.

And she hopes, dearly, that if Critt gets a few years here, and enough time to learn how to channel his power and his dark, he’ll begin to balance, and… with any luck, his parents will come around to the idea that he doesn’t need to be a Jedi.

“Maybe your son will decide to become a Jedi, and if he does, I’ll offer him the same promise I give all of my students, I won’t stop him or stand in his way, but I’ll train him to understand and appreciate his dark, because we’ve all got at least some of it, and I’ll help him see his life, and figure out how to use it, and I’ll encourage him to learn what came before, and study it well enough to see where the problems were, so he can change enough to avoid them.” Rey looks at the lighter stones swirling through her floors. “We live and thrive because there are suns to keep us warm and light our days, but we need dark, too. We need rest and night, and as long as we can live in a universe that understands that, I think we’ll get on fine.” She looks up at Millie and Rafe, “And if you can understand that, at least enough to give me a chance, I can offer your son a wider world than he can find on his own.”

She takes a breath and offers them her hands. “Please. Let me train him.”

They glance at each other, and Rafe nods, curtly, and squeezes her hands, which surprises her.

“Poe said you need farmers?” Rafe asks.

She gets the feel that this is part of it, too. They aren’t happy where they were before. Feeling stagnant, constantly arguing, reminded of bad bits of history. The chance to start over fresh matters to them.

She gets a flash of a baby and… And she doesn’t know what happened to it, neither of them are thinking about it, but it was their child, and there’s no baby now, so…

A new start.

“We need everyone and thing here. But, yes. We bought the microfarms to get some fresh food in and we’re hoping to eventually have fields open to the sky.”

Millie nods. “The microfarms aren’t really good for cereal crops. They’re more for salad greens, some root vegetables, vine veggies, berries.”

“Strawberries?” Rey’s starting to get come concrete plans in mind for what she wants in her bit of the farms.

“Yeah, we can do strawberries. They do fine in a microfarm.” Millie looks around. “We can see grass, so it looks like your ground will support grains. Let’s see what you’ve got. We’ll take soil samples, and get to work. At the very least, grass grows here, so the soil isn’t sterile, but it might need a lot of help to grow anything with enough nutrition to be useful for humans.”

“Though…” Rafe’s looking around. From the chapel, he’s got a view of the lake, the settlement, and the plains stretching on into the sky beyond. “Is it very dry or windy here?”

Rey shakes her head. “It rains all the time, probably sleet any day now, and no, not very windy, but I’ve only been here for about ten months…”

They glance at each other, and again at the great plain around them. “Are there any trees?”

She shakes her head. “Not that I’ve seen.”

“Anywhere, on the planet?”

“No?” Rey’s not sure why they’re asking. “At least not the parts I’ve seen.”

“Bushes, thickets, vines?” Millie asks.

“Grass. Bushes. Scrub.” She gestures to one of the rough patches visible from the dome. “We’ve seen grass and mosses and some thick vines, brush in some of hollows, but mostly grass.”

Rafe and Millie are looking worried, and Rey doesn’t like the feel of that. “Animals?”

“Fish, turtles, insects, a few lizards, and we’ve seen small tunnels under the ground,” Rey holds her hands together in a circle, giving the Kennas the idea of the tunnel size, “but haven’t found what makes them.”

They look at each other again. “No mammals?”

“Not that I’ve seen… Oh, by the ocean there were birds.”

The Kennas nod at each other, and Rafe asks, “It was warm when you got here?”

“Yes, hot even. Then it got rainy, and it’s been getting cooler ever since. We got freezing rain last night. Threepio says he thinks we should have sleet soon, and snow in a few months.”

“And there’s not another settlement on this planet?” Millie asks.

“No.”

Both of them glance at the two suns. “Did you check the ice caps at the poles when you were deciding to stay here?” Rafe’s voice sounds tentative as he asks that.

“No.” But Rey remembers what she saw. “They covered about a quarter of the planet, though.”

Millie whimpers.

Rafe swallows hard, and then says, “Do you like _cold_ , probably followed by _hot_?”

“Uh…”

“There’s only one way you get a planet like this. It’s so cold in the winter that anything above ground dies and/or it’s so hot in the summer that anything above ground dies.”

“There’d be trees somewhere, unless the soil is almost nutrient free or it gets so cold they can’t survive through the winter. If there are no large, above ground animals, then it’s got to get cold or hot long enough they can’t make it.”

“We’ve seen tracks and eggs, so we think there’s some sort of big turtle.” But Rey’s got the sense that huge turtles aren’t what the Kennas are thinking about when they’re mentioning large animals.

That’s useful for Rafe to know. “Turtles can go underwater when it gets cold or hot, and they can hibernate so deeply they basically die. They can stay under for months at a time at a degree or two above freezing or a degree or two below hyperthermia. However deep your lake is, at least some of it has to stay water year round. That’s where the turtles go when it gets cold or too hot. What do they eat?”

Rey doesn’t know. “Whatever it is that makes the tunnels? We’ve found spots where they dug up the ground with their beaks to get at them.”

“But you haven’t seen the turtles?” Millie asks.

Rey shakes her head. “Just a few of the eggs that didn’t make it, and some dead babies. One empty shell, big enough you could camp in it. Wherever the adults sleep, they don’t go out when we can see them.”

“How deep is the lake?” Rafe asks.

Rey shrugs. “More than 2 meters.” She knows Kylo’s gone out far enough in it to submerge himself, but cold and wet really isn’t her thing, so she’s never done more than wade.

“How deep is the permafrost?” he adds.

It’s clear Rey doesn’t know what that is, so Millie adds, “A layer of ground that’s _always_ frozen.”

“We’ve never dug deeper than forty centimeters, and down there it’s just dirt.”

It’s clear that they’re getting a lot less worried about what Rey might be teaching, and more worried about the weather.

Rafe looks to the sky, seeing the green sun, steady and bright, and the blue one, small and already setting. “There’ll be a time when only the green sun is in the sky, and it’s going to be cold. Really cold. Well below zero cold. Are you set for that?”

“I can be.”

Millie’s also watching the sky. “And in a year or so, by the imperial calendar, we’ll likely be moving into spring, and then a summer when at least one sun will always be in the sky, no night at all, or if there is, it’ll be an hour or so, and it’ll be _hot._ ”

Rey grits her teeth. She knows all about hot planets, and if this one gets so hot people can’t live on it… She really doesn’t want to see it. “So, you’re saying there might be a reason why there’s never been a permanent human settlement here?” Rey says, thinking that a completely empty planet just waiting around for her likely was too good to be true.

“Yes.” They look to each other. Millie says, “If we’re lucky, this planet goes around both suns, and it’ll get cold, and hot, but it’ll be in the survivable band. If we’re not, it goes between the suns, and come summer, everything that can’t live underground or water dies.

“Humans have carved settlements out of almost anything and everything, but if we get a few years into this, it might prove to be true that we should move,” Rafe says.

Millie looks at her chapel. “It’s clear this matters to you, and it’s clear you want a view of the sky. And it’s possible that this is a planet where that’s only going to be true during a few sweet months where it gets just enough heat from both suns to keep it nice, and not so much to turn it into an oven, or so little as to turn it into a freezer.”

“How are you set for getting out of here if we’ve got to move?” Rafe asks.

Rey sighs. “I’d prefer not to have to, but… better than you’d likely expect.” That gets some raised eyebrows. “We’ve got pilots, and are getting ships, and if need be, we’ll move. I’ve got a friend who could house all of us, and barely notice it, while we looked for somewhere else.”

Rafe looks around, and then says, “I know this is indelicate, but… how are you paying for this?”

“Goodwill and cheating at gambling.”

“You’re…” Millie isn’t exactly horrified, but she’s not comfortable with this, either.

“I have friends donating money and goods. That’s the goodwill half. As for gambling… We don’t have anything to trade. I don’t want to charge students, and it’s not like most of them could pay. Critt’s the first one who isn’t an orphan, so… I’m Maji, I can tell what cards the people at the table around me have, so when I play, I win. Or I can make the die come up with the roll I need. And I can, if need be, make the roulette table come up the way I want it to.”

“You’re stealing,” Millie’s voice is flat as she says it, and Rey can feel her starting to regret getting involved with this. Cheating at dice games goes against all of her light side instincts.

“Do you have a better suggestion?”

Rafe and Millie look at each other, and shake their heads.       

    

 

* * *

As Rey’s walking Millie and Rafe around, showing them the settlement, and the plains around it, Rafe says, “Are four of those children in Order uniforms?”

“Yes.” Rey says, fairly sure this is going to be a sticking point for the Kennas.

“Why?” Millie asks.

“It’s the warmest clothing they have,” Rey’s not exactly evading the question, but she wants a better feel for how they understand the Order.

“Why are Order uniforms the warmest clothing they have?” Millie knows she’s being played, and isn’t exactly enjoying it.

As she’s asking, Poe joins them, bringing Finn and Rose and Paige over to be introduced. “Critt looks like he’s feeling pretty good about this. He’s got three of the other boys helping him lay out where he wants his cottage. I’ve never seen anyone so thrilled to dig a water pipe trench.

“Also, Rafe and Millie, this is Finn and Rose, and little girl over here is Paige.”

Everyone says hello. And for a moment Rafe and Millie watch Critt already starting to set up his cottage. Apparently, he’s got no interest in waiting to find out if he’s got ‘permission’ to say.

Millie and Rafe offer small smiles at that. Critt’s not going to like hearing that he is _not_ getting his own cottage. If they’re staying here, he’s staying with them. It’s also clear they’re still waiting for Rey to answer their question. “Order uniforms…” Rafe prods.

Rey responds, “Because when my man takes them from the Order _,_ he doesn’t have them strip off and change into civvies first.”

Finn adds, “Padme’s our spy in the Order. He finds Force sensitives there, and then brings them here.”

“Oh. He rescues them?” Millie likes that, and Rey can feel Rafe approving of that, too.

Rey replies with, “If you’d like to look at it that way, you can. Poe and Finn and Rose all see it that way, too.”

Poe adds, “But you might not want to say that out loud, all of them joined the Order intentionally, because the Order got them out of slavery or begging on the streets. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s _difficult_ to convince an eleven-year-old that the group that saved her life, offered her citizenship, and a path to mattering are the ‘bad guys.’ At least two of them are planning on going back once they’re done here, becoming officers, and I know one hopes to stand for election to the Senate when that begins. You don’t trust Ren is out of the Jedi-killing business, but they do.”

Rey almost cocks an eyebrow when she feels the Kennas respond to that. They hate Kylo _more_ for doing things like freeing slaves. They want him to be loathsome and evil, and everything he does to try to break that image makes them hate him more.

“Does… Padme?” Rafe’s voice asks, and Rey nods, “think he’s ‘rescuing’ them?”

“He thinks he’s doing what’s best for them,” Rey answers.

“When do we meet Padme?” Millie asks.

“You don’t.”

“Uh…” Rafe says. That’s a very definite blow off.

“He takes children and _things_ away from The Order. He’s high enough ranked that if anyone ever knew who he was it’d be an issue,” Rey says. “You may see him around, but don’t get too close. Don’t try to chat him up. The kids get to see him, when he grabs them, because they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. Those of us who leave the planet, who might run into the Order, don’t get to see him. If you can identify him, you can get all of us hurt.”

“That said, we’re trying to get him here. We’re going to run out of teachers of the Force stuff, soon, and Padme’s the only other Force sensitive adult we know, so…” Finn’s staring at Rey.

“Finn…”

“Yeah, we know. Big hot shot in The Order. If we don’t know his face we can’t accidently turn him in. I _know._ But really, he doesn’t need to be there.”

“If it’s not clear, this is a very pro-Resistance sort of place,” Rose adds. “We don’t trot that out in front of the kids all that much, beyond, of course the basic teachings of the Maji being deeply at odds with the ideals of the First Order, but…”

“But you’re not Resisting anymore,” Millie says

“Not much point to it,” Rey adds. “And especially since they started recruiting slaves and treating people like people, not everyone, especially among these younger ones, hate them.”

Rose clasps Millie’s hands. “Everyone here, over the age of twenty, has lost… more than we can count, to the First Order, but rather than spend our lives fighting a lost battle, we’re building something new, better.”

Finn looks around at the endless tracts of semi-frozen grassland around them. “And you’re welcome to as much of it as you want to work on building your own new and better.”

Rey offers a silent thank you to both of them for putting it that well. Those were the magic words necessary to start getting the Kennas to relax and start seriously thinking about staying here.

 

 

* * *

“So…” Rey says to Critt when she gets a few moments with him in the chapel. “You staying?”

He nods. “I am. Are they?”

“I think so.”

He slumps, looking down-trodden. “I suppose it couldn’t all be good.”

“Do you think your parents being here will be a problem?”

He shrugs. “I think it’d be easier if it were just me.”

Rey has a difficult time even starting to grasp that, but she nods anyway. “I’m sure it feels that way.”

He’s looking around the chapel, sky spreading around them, swirl below their feet. “Magiit says you aren’t going to make me learn to be a Jedi.”

“I’ll give you access to everything I have about being a Jedi, and if you want it, you can try, but—“

He cuts in, voice defensive, posture hunched. “You think I’m unsuited for it.”

“You read that off my body language or feel it in my mind?”

“Both.”

She grabs two of the pillows at the edge of the dome, and tosses one to him. “Come on, sit down.”

“Are we meditating?”

“No, talking.” She puts her pillow down and gets settled. “We do meditate, but we talk a lot, too. Learn from each other’s ideas of what’s happening around us.” She shifts her weight on the pillow a bit, and Critt sits, too. “Might as well be comfortable as we do it.

 

 

“You’re aware enough to know you’re not quite like the other students, right?”

“Yeah. I know. It’s nice they aren’t freaked out by it. That’s new. Back home… You’d think I have a tail and horns.”

Rey doesn’t get that reference, but she figures it’s bad. “Okay. No tail.” She gently rubs the top of his head and he looks at her like she’s insane. “I don’t feel any horns. You look awfully human to me.”

He rolls his eyes, annoyance flaming off of him. “You don’t have to coddle me.”

“Of course, I don’t! Maybe, I’m doing it because I _want_ to. Maybe, I think it’s important that someone, at least once, and likely more often than that, takes the time to tell you, _it’s okay._ ” She uses all of her light to flood him with a feeling of acceptance. “You are allowed to be dark. You’re allowed to be angry or tense or worried or attached or passionate. You do not have to be a passive vessel of calm and serenity. You are allowed to feel whatever it is you feel, and you are encouraged to take the time and figure out what those feelings actually are and why you are feeling them. You don’t have to deny them or stuff them into the back of your mind, or pretend they aren’t there.”

Critt blinks, stunned. Not only has no one ever said this to him, no one’s ever even hinted that anyone might feel this way about him.

“The Force doesn’t make mistakes, Critt. You are who you are for a reason. I don’t know what that is, yet, but one day you likely will. And until then, we’re going to learn how to use your feelings, how to master them, and marry them to a vision of a future you _want._

“We don’t have a lot of rules here, but the ones we do have matter. There’s a line between evil and dark, and you’ve got to stay on the dark side of the line. So, evil, for our purposes, that’s hurting others or yourself. Don’t do it. If you’ve got to run around on the plain and break rocks and kick bushes to keep from doing it, that’s fine. This is a place where you can do whatever it is you need to do to keep yourself from crossing that line.

“Kindness may not be something that comes easily to you, but we’ll work on it. I’ll encourage you to be kind to your fellows, and with yourself. And hopefully, if people aren’t constantly telling you to not be you, you’ll find it easier to just _be._ ”

Critt doesn’t look like he knows what to do with this. There’s an almost all over shudder at the idea that Rey might not be lying to him, and an all over hardening, protecting himself from wanting this, because as much as he might want this it can’t be _real_.

She gently touches his hand. “It’s real, Critt. You don’t have to believe it right now, but it’s real.”

“My parents want me to be a Jedi.”

“I got that sense.”

“They’ll make me leave when they see—“

“Critt, you’re here. You’ll stay as long as you want to.”

“They—“

“Love you very much. And they’re very hurt. And you know them better than I do, so I’m not going to say that your understanding of them is wrong. I am going to say give them time. This is a place where people grow and change. This is a place where people balance. You’re not here just for you. You’re here for them, too. So, time. Time for you. Time for them. Time to learn and live.”

“They’ll disappoint you.”

Rey shrugs a bit. “Wouldn’t be the first time.” She stands up and levitates the pillow back to the pile of them. “Might as well get as much out of this as we can, though. Can you do that?”

He shakes his head. “No. I can… burst, and send things flying, but not… controlled, the way you just did.”

“Tomorrow, we’ll work on balancing. Trust me, everything is easier once you find your balance point.”

Critt’s looking skeptical, but willing to give her a try.

“That’s good enough.”

 

* * *

As they’re walking out he says, “Do I have to live with them? They say if we stay, I have to live with them.”

Rey nods. “For now. What was the age of adulthood where you’re from?”

“Seventeen.”

“Then as long as things are more or less stable, seventeen is when you can move out.”

She can feel him thinking that three years is _forever._ “Everyone else gets to live on their own.”

“Everyone else would give their right or left hand to have parents who care enough about them to do things like completely upend their entire life, abandon their business, move to a new planet with a bunch of strangers, just to give their son the best chance he has at a good life. I know you’re young, and this has always been your life, but don’t take it for granted.”

That gets a long suffering sigh.

Rey nods at that, too. “Uh huh. Get to know your new classmates. It’ll give you perspective, and that’ll help you balance, too.”

She can feel he’s sure that she’s wrong. And… well… maybe she is. But it doesn’t feel that way, and that’s the best she can do for right now.


	37. The Personal and the Political

7/23/1

 

“You want me to just… invite them here?” Kylo asks, looking over at Kinear and Schiff, who are sitting across from him, and Jon, who they appear to have enlisted in some sort of scheme to have… a party.

“Yes. The new colonies all have some sort of provisional leadership. It would be beneficial for them to meet with the people we’re going to import to either run or fix things up, before they get there, in a relaxed setting,” Kinear says.

Kylo rubs his lips together. That doesn’t sound unreasonable.

“Plus, they get to meet you, feel like they’re being welcomed into the Order, that they are valuable to you,” Schiff adds.

Okay, that’s good, too. But, there are fifty names on this list, and that’s way too many for just a ‘Welcome To The Order’ gathering. “That’s a third of the people on this list.”

Schiff nods. “Yes it is. Everyone else on that list either runs, or wants to be running, a colony we could improve.”

Kylo nods, still eyeing the names. Most of them mean nothing to him. “Won’t their home worlds object?”

Schiff nods. “Oh, they would, if they knew. When I say _run,_ I mean we’re inviting the people who are the provisional governors or executive officer.”

“The ones who would complain to the homeworld about unruly workers grumbling to leave,” Kinear adds.

“Or… interesting developments regarding organization and alliances between said colony and a new parent system,” Schiff adds. “If we make it worth their while to work with us, it’s entirely likely, especially in these larger systems, where there are multiple light decades between the home planet and the colonies, that we’ll have entirely taken over before the homeworld even knows we’re there.

 

 

Kylo looks to Jon, who’s just been sitting there, listening to this, not being what he’d consider terribly helpful. Jon just looks back at him. He’s not about to set a toe out of line here, now. In fact, like many junior officers in an incredibly comfortable niche, he has no desire whatsoever for any of the higher ups to notice him, because they’ll likely try to move him out of his incredibly comfortable niche.

Kylo looks back to Schiff and Kinear. “And we do this by having a party?”

Kinear’s grinning. “Aye, sir, we do. A state dinner, and a grand one at that. It’s amazing what honeyed words and honeyed wine can do.”

Kylo rolls his eyes, shakes his head a little, and says, “Fine. Have your party. Get me at least two additional colonies out of it.”

Schiff grins. “Done, sir.”

  

 

* * *

Jon lingers, waiting for the General and Admiral to leave. He’s said not a single word more than was necessary to explain the look, theme, and costs of said party and putting the guests up in accommodations that would please them.

Once they’re gone, he says to Kylo, “I’m sorry, sir. General Kinear grabbed me and… he didn’t order me not to say anything about it, but it was awfully implied that I shouldn’t until he brought it to you.”

Kylo nods. “And like any good officer, you take orders from whomever outranks you.”

Jon’s look says it all.

“Did his… request, feel off to you?”

“No, but… My mother had a rule, when someone in power tells you _not_ to tell the guy at the top of the heap what’s going on, start yelling. Something’s going to go sideways. I couldn’t think of any dangerous sideways for this, so, I didn’t yell, but…”

“Okay. You are now, hereby, directly ordered to tell me anytime anyone asks you to do anything you think I should know about.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“So…” Kylo leads.

“Sir?”

“You were here, you listened, is this worth it? I know those two want to do this. I can feel they think it will be useful, but it’s easy to decide the things you want are necessary. What do you think?”

Jon shrugs. “I want to do it, so I’m not terribly objective on if this is necessary.”

“You… like things like this?”

He shrugs again. “I always did. My mom’s clients would, often, invite her or us to the weddings. Mom never liked leaving Coruscant, so she’d send us to the off-world ones. I saw more splendid parties than you can imagine. And, maybe it’s shallow or unworthy, or wasteful, but it was beautiful.” He touches one of his sketches of the throne room decked out for the festivities. “We spent so long destroying everything we touched. There’s something to be said for something beautiful to celebrate the connections and alliances we’re making.”

Kylo looks at the sketch. He nods slowly, feeling Jon seeing his palace coming to life. “There is.”

 

 

* * *

“Thoughts?” he says to Rey later that night, after explaining what Kinear, Schiff, and Jon have hit him with while they eat.

“Better you than me?” she replies.

“That’s useful.”

She shrugs. “It doesn’t sound… I don’t know. I mean, if it gets you what you want…”

“If.”

“If… Worst comes to worst, it doesn’t work and you don’t do it again?”

Kylo supposes that’s one way to look at it. “Worst comes to worst, it does, and I have to do it a lot.”

She smirks at him. “Would that be a bad thing?”

He sighs, and doesn’t think, too loudly, _only if I don’t have to do it alone._ Instead, he changes the subject. “How’d your adventures in teaching Maji philosophy to the Kennas go?”

Rey rolls her eyes extravagantly, and then allows herself to slouch into Kylo. He wraps his arm around her and kisses her forehead. “The kids _never_ give me this much trouble. They’re constantly telling me I’m _wrong._ Often about the philosophy I’m creating myself.”

“Speaking of better you than me.” He figures he could take, at most, ten minutes of that before he had to leave to hit something.

“Really. I’m proud to say that not only have I _not_ hit either of them, I’ve started fobbing them off onto Threepio, who enjoys lecturing them about what the books _actually_ say.”

Kylo smirks at that. “He always did like being the smartest thing in the room.”

“And he still does.” She reaches for a roll, and begins to spread butter on it. “Better yet, R2’s here, and he was lurking about, not really paying much attention, until Threepio and the Kennas got talking about Yoda, and then… Okay, all I’ll say about that is A: it’s a good thing they had no idea what he was saying, and B: Yoda, at least according to R2, was something of a turd.”

Kylo smirks at that. “He’s still angry about being left out in the rain, isn’t he?”

“The rain, the swamp, getting hit with a walking stick, and something about pretending not to know who he was. Threepio got really interested in that, and they wandered off to talk for a bit, but… Yeah.”

Kylo looks at her for a moment, putting together the comment about the walking stick, and what Luke said to him. He shakes his head a little, and reaches for another roll, too. “These are good.”

Rey nods. “Make sure they go on the regular rotation.”

“I can do that.” 

 

* * *

8/18/1

 

“I’ll be late tonight,” Kylo says to Rey.

“I know.” She smirks a little. “What was that about rich people, powers that be, and ballrooms not being part of your experience?”

He glares at her, though there’s not any heat in it, says “No ballroom,” and flashes away from Lirium.

 

* * *

“So, what am I supposed to do at this thing?” Kylo asks, standing in his office, waiting with Kinear, about to go into his throne room for the first ever state dinner hosted by The Order.

“Be pleasant,” Kinear says with a smile. A smile with knives in it. “And don’t shake hands.”

Kylo rolls his eyes. “It was a dominance game.”

“ _I know_. I’ve played it a million times, and until you’re willing to lose one, don’t play.”

“Why would I lose?”

Kinear fiddles with his already perfect cuffs. “Because, sometimes, a quick loss now sets you up for a better, bigger win later. Because if you do decide you’re going to engage in stupid handholding games, and literally crush anyone who challenges you, you’re going to have more and more people try, hoping they’ll be the one to win, and sooner or later, one of them _will._ So, until you’re ready to give someone a gentle grasp and then _let go_ , don’t shake hands.”

Kylo sighs, that makes more sense than he’d like.

Kinear can see he’s less than a minute from cancelling this. “Don’t do that. Go out there, be pleasant, meet people, remember their names and at least something about them, and do your best to make them understand that they _want_ to work with you because it’ll work out better for them in the long run.”

“I’m not cut out for this.”

“You asked for a map. Sometimes the path leads us through rough territory. You’ll get through this.”

Kylo sighs, forcing himself into a very tall, very straight, very _uncomfortable_ looking posture.

“Good Lord! Stop that! At ease, comfortable. Fake it if you can’t feel it. I was never within a thousand light years of your father, but he had a reputation for staying cool when everything around him was hot. It’s in your blood, so use it.”

Kylo raises an eyebrow at him, and Kinear nods briefly, he knows _exactly_ who Kylo’s father is.

“This is your home and you’ve invited people who you hope to encourage to work with you to it. That’s politics. You’re Leia Organa’s boy. Breha and Bail Organa’s grandson. Politics is also in your blood. You were literally born for this, _Prince Ben of Alderaan_. Now, go, do it.”

Kylo swallows at that. Apparently, Kinear has done the research.

He nods to the lightsaber. “You want peace, take it off. They are guests of honor in your home. Meet them unarmed. It’ll go better.”

He can feel Kylo doesn’t like that. And not liking that is pulling his attention away from the fact that Kinear knows vastly more about him than he should.

“Tuck a knife into your boot or sleeve if you like, pretend you can’t kill a man with a twitch of your finger, but _look_ unarmed. You’ve invited these people into your capitol ship, for a bit of socializing and a good meal, because you want to build a better galaxy with them, so give them a warm welcome and start explaining how joining up with us is the key to that better galaxy.”

Kylo inhales, fast, holds up one hand, and stalks out of his office and back to his room. He changes into his _formal_ clothing fast, and pulls his hair back. He eyes the cologne, but since he’s never actually played with it, he’s not sure how much to put on and he’s already starting to border on late, so…

 

 

* * *

When he steps out, Kinear eyes the clothing. This is Jon’s second go at it. Most of the pieces are the same, though the silver accents have been muted down to light gray or steel gray. Still expensive and elegant, but less shiny. He notes the cut, the lack of weapons, and looks satisfied. “Better. Come, Master, let’s charm them into our embrace.”

Kylo doesn’t roll his eyes, he does say, quietly, “What gives you the idea I’ve ever done that before?”

Kinear smiles grandly. “Your lady pulled you away from your work, not the other way around. Obviously, at least _once_ , you managed to be charming.”

Kylo smirks, a little at that, thinking of how he got Rey in the first place. “I sent my entire squadron after her, found her in the forest, knocked her out, strapped her to a chair, and then interrogated her.”

Kinear stifles a quick laugh. “That may be a sub-optimal strategy for this. Just be nice, and pretend you enjoy talking to and listening to these people.” As they’re a few meters from the door, Kinear says, “You know, it’s fairly common for people to bring their companions to things like this. Most of the people attending this have brought their partners.”

Kylo understands the intention behind that sentence, but he doesn’t reply directly to it. He says, “Will your wife be joining us?” instead.

“Of course. On a mission like this, I never fight alone. It’s good to always have someone watching your back.”

“Introduce me to her?”

“I was planning to.”

Kylo takes one last deep breath as the doors slide open, and then does his best to at least fake being happy to meet with these people in a relaxed setting.

 

 

* * *

Originally, Kylo’s throne room was a ship hangar. He had no interest in taking over Snoke’s rooms. (This would be putting it mildly, he’d ordered them destroyed, but when it was gently explained to him, by an extremely nervous Hux, that the ship was holding together by luck and steeltape, so maybe it didn’t need any extra holes in it, he acquiesced to just abandoning them. He thinks they’re using them for storage space now.)

The only requests he had for his rooms were related to access. One elevator. One door from the throne room to his office, one door from his office to his rooms.

There wasn’t anything that _quite_ fit that bill. But General Ulnitor, was one of Snoke’s pets, so he had a private hanger for his ship, his own office, and his own rooms. He also didn’t survive Holdo’s attack. They ripped one of the elevators out. Stuffed a throne in the middle of the hanger, and probably painted the whole thing black. (He knows he didn't ask for black, but it damn well was black when he got here. He's not sure if Hux took care of that, or not.)

Kylo took one look at it, decided it’d do, and that was that.

That said, since Jon’s gotten done with it, his throne room is finally starting to look… Impressive.

Like any mechanical bay, it’s got struts and joists to keep the ceiling high. And, of course, it’s got an entire “wall” of empty space. With a view of the galaxy, something people who generally live on land don’t get to see. Jon also had the mechanics rip the ceiling off, extending the field that keeps the atmosphere in place.

So now, he’s got a huge expanse of black metal, studded with white lights, with a his throne, which he’s not sitting in because the damn thing is fucking uncomfortable, in the middle, surrounded by people and a long table, overlooking endless sky. Stars in front of them, stars above, and the cradle of the Order keeping them safe.

Kylo likes it. He’s more than a little nervous about all the people in here, and he’s being introduced to them, which is making his palms sweat a little, but at least the throne room looks fucking amazing.

 

 

* * *

He feels it when Jon sees him, the all over intake of air at seeing one of his creations come into play, and also the thrill that Kylo’s taking this step.

Kylo decides he likes the fact that _someone_ here is unreservedly pleased to see him.

The rest of the party… Well, they’re certainly _interested._

He’s not sure if that’s good, but it’s something, so…

Time to be _pleasant._

 

 

* * *

Of the myriad ways Kylo Ren has been described, pleasant isn’t among them. But he’s damn well trying.

It’s _hard._

And part of him feels like this is beyond _futile_. The idea that standing around, smiling (at least occasionally), sipping a cup of coffee, (Not wine. There is wine. A lot of it. There are droids doing nothing but circling around refilling people’s glasses. He understands why Kinear’s making sure that their guests have a lot of it. But, unlike the rest of his staff, he doesn’t need the people around him to be at least somewhat drunk to feel what they’re feeling/thinking.) trying to make functional small talk with… dignitaries… could result in anything positive boggles him.

But, he can feel a lot of the people around him are deeply intrigued by this.

And some of them are starting to think he might be useful. If for nothing else than a way to offload their own maladjusted miscontents. He may not be getting much in the way of colonies from this, but at the very least he’ll have permission to put his recruiting stations nearby. He’s not exactly sure that’s who he’s hoping to recruit, but… Maybe he wasn’t ever the Crown Prince of Alderaan. Not really. But he’s fairly comfortable with the idea that he could easily be the Crown Prince of Maladjusted Miscontents.

_People, not planets._

He’ll find a use for them.

Others… he can feel the greed. They want to set themselves up in their own little kingdoms. And he appears to be offering a way for them to do just that. He has a feeling they’re going to be massively shocked when they realize that they’ll have the option of joining the Order or going back to their homeworld once he’s fully got control of this, but… That’s later.

For now, he needs enough access to get his people in, and from there…

 

* * *

_Smile at her._  He feels Kinear thinking it, loud and direct. He doesn’t appear to be paying any attention to Kylo at all. He and Schiff are off glad-handing some… Actually, Kylo has no idea who they’re talking to. He met the… he’s actually not sure what it is, either. For the sake of simplicity, he’ll call it a person, and go from there.

He met the person in the receiving line. Nodded at… it… Attempted to remember what it was and why it’s here, but… Any and all information regarding the person are gone by now.

The her in question is a very pretty girl, and this one may literally be a girl. If she’s more than seventeen standard years old he’d be shocked, except… She’s acting a lot older. Looks younger than Rey, but…

_She’s trying to flirt with me._

Kinear doesn’t glance away from the person, doesn’t blink, doesn’t indicate anything other than an amiable chat is happening as he thinks to Kylo, _I know, flirt back._

 

 

The first thought that goes ricocheting through Kylo’s mind would be _How?_ And that makes him feel bad because not only does he not know how to do this, but he feels like even if he did, he _shouldn’t._ He doesn’t blast Kinear with _Rey’s at home, and I don’t want to do this, well, maybe I do, but I shouldn’t, and there are all these complicated feelings, and I never learned how to do this as a teenager like most humans do, and shit she is really attractive, and with as tall as I am I can more or less see directly down her dress, and okay, those are some_ really _nice breasts, and I don’t want to notice that either, and I love my wife, and…_ He’s about to shatter the coffee cup in his hand when Jon swoops in and says, “I’m sorry, Miss, Master Ren, I need your attention for a moment,” and then pulls him away.

And away.

And out of the room to his office.

“Better?” Jon asks.

Kylo takes a deep breath and nods. “Yes. Thank you.”

Jon’s eyeing him. “You looked really uncomfortable there.”

“I was. I… don’t… know how to do that.”

Jon blinks, and then slowly nods, and says, “Well, uh… generally, you… Sort of smile, and say something nice, and just kind of flow with it.”

“I didn’t want to _flow_ with it.”

Jon blinks again, and rapidly comes to the conclusion that Kylo’s more than a tad rough on certain skills. Then he comes to another conclusion, and that’s this is an adult man who likely doesn’t know that it’s okay to be attracted to people who are not your mate. He blinks once more in surprise. Then, worse, he sees how Kylo is staring at him, like he’s some sort of lifeline who’s got the answers to this, and… “Uh… your… love… Is she your… first?” He feels off treading into this territory, but he’s got the sinking suspicion that no one else ever has before, so…

“Yes.”

Jon nods again. “Ah. And… uh… You two are still… fairly new? Less than two years, maybe?”

Kylo nods at that, too.

“Okay.” Jon rubs his lips together, not entirely sure how to breach this subject. “So… Okay… Uh… The thing is…” _The thing is the wolves, or whatever, who raised you damn well should have had this conversation with you by now, or better yet, fifteen years ago…_ That’s inappropriate. And… shit, Kylo’s eye flinched as he was thinking that, so he likely heard it. Time to save this. “Your heart and your shaft aren’t always going to be on the same plan. And that’s really _normal._ Especially, if you’ve been with someone for a while. And by normal, I mean it happens to literally _everyone._ No exceptions. At all. Ever. And… uh… usually… most people will have a discussion, at some point, about uh… what they’re going to do about that. A lot of humans seem to prefer just being with one person at a time. Some of them don’t. I’ve seen people form trios and quads, too. Or continuing to see lots of people. But, that’s generally something they work out between them.”

Kylo just blinks at him.

“Okay, the point I’m trying to make is, it’s completely normal to see someone and enjoy looking. You do not have to feel bad about that. And, if you and your lady haven’t already, you might want to have a little chat with her about what the lines are, but… Really, having a warm conversation with someone you find attractive, while you’re in public and surrounded by fifty other people should not be over the line. And if it is over the line, most people would tell you that if your mate has that much of a stranglehold on you that you need to get out of that relationship.”

Kylo blinks at that, too. Jon looks at him expectantly. Finally he says, “I… It’s not anything from her that makes this uncomfortable. I can’t imagine it’d bother her. She’d… know that this is troublesome for me, so she wouldn’t be worried, but… It bothers me.”

Jon’s turn to blink. “Uh…”

“I don’t want to want anyone else. It feels bad _to me._ ”

Jon nods, getting that. “Well, I’d admit monogamy would be easier if you were never attracted to anyone else, but… That’s not how it works. Maybe you decide that only having sex with her makes you both happy. Maybe you decide that you both like sex with other people,” Jon sees Kylo wince at him just saying it, and amends it to, “Or not. But… wanting to break stuff because you got a view of a girl’s boobs, when she’s wearing a dress” Jon gestures with his fingers mimicking the cut of the dress, “specifically designed to show them off _and_ attract your attention to them, isn’t a good plan.”  

Kylo exhales through clenched teeth. “What did you and… your man… what was his name?”

“Lane… His name was Lane, and, we were monogamous. But, neither of us was dead or blind, so… And, uh… we had… similar tastes in men… so… _looking_ , _together_ was something of a treat.” Jon thinks about it. “It’s a lot like food. There really isn’t any one right way to eat it. And yes some people don’t get on well with some foods, so they should avoid them. And too much of other foods can make you sick. But, really, when it comes down to it, figuring how you and your partner like to have sex should be a lot like figuring out how you like to eat. You don’t always only have your favorite meal, or only hers, and if there’s something you don’t like, she doesn’t make you choke it down just to please her, and… And you just work it out based on what feels right for you.”

“Wanting someone else doesn’t feel right.”

“Wanting someone else doesn’t feel right, or _having_ someone else doesn’t feel right, and you’re afraid if you _want_ you might step over the line and _have?_ ”

Kylo looks away, really uncomfortable. “It’s not that, exactly. I really don’t want to _want_ or _have_. I’ve got all the _having_ I could possibly want at home. But it’d be so easy, you know? She, and the others, are there, dressed like that, specifically to get _me_ to look, and to want, and to _have._ It’s a game to them. A series of orchestrated manipulations, for a _politically_ desired end result, and apparently my shaft is the easiest bit of me to manipulate, so… They’ll throw anyone at me who has any chance of making me hard, and… And I _hate_ how that feels. I hate that I fall for it. I hate that I see… and _want_ … and I’m proving them right, because they’re watching, closely, and I know if I look like I’m enjoying it, they’ll throw more of them at me, and… I can feel it. I could be Kinear’s age, horribly disfigured, three quarters machine, and they’d still be flashing their… what did you call them?”

“Boobs?”

Kylo decides he likes that term. “Boobs in my face. They don’t want me. They don’t know enough me to even begin to be interested in wanting me. They want The Order and the access to power I provide and… And they think by appealing to my shaft they might get it. And my shaft, stupid, fucking lump of flesh, is sitting there thinking, ‘BOOOBS! Oh, they look so soft!’”

Jon sniggers. “Well, best I can tell, that’s just being a man who likes women. I mean… they are soft, you know? Like, really soft!”

“I know…” And small, and fit just right in his hand, and mouth, and trail over his chest, or against his back, and that one time, when she was leaning over him, and holding them together he could rub between them, and that actually didn’t work so well with Rey because hers are little, but the other girl had big ones and… Kylo realizes what Jon said, and that jerks him out of what he appreciates about boobs. “ _You_ know?”

Jon smiles. “Yeah, I _know_. I wasn’t born married. I uh… had a good time, and uh… probably every sort of good time you can imagine… and… uh… I’m going to guess more than a few you can’t… in my late teens and early twenties, because, well, I went to a _lot_ of weddings, and people at weddings often… want to fuck. And… well, I like people, so… Uh... yeah, I  _know._ ” He’s staring at Kylo, more or less willing him to get the idea so he doesn’t have to spell it out any clearer.

“Oh.” Kylo’s feeling really surprised at that. “So…”

Jon nods, a pleased expression on his face. “And that was an especially fine set of boobs in a dress exquisitely designed to show them off as nicely as possible, and yes, I _noticed._ Every person with a pulse and an even vague interest in women at this thing noticed. The people who don’t like women noticed. The _droids_ serving drinks noticed. The fucking _drinks_ noticed. That was probably a fifteen thousand credit dress designed to put her boobs on full display. That jewel between them was not there as an accident, it’s there to make you _look._

“And, look, I… have no idea what to do about why they’re flashing boobs in your face. You’re not wrong. I mean, sex has been a way to gain power probably as long as sex and power have been things, and… It’s not going to stop. Ever. You’re right, you’ll be a hundred and three, on a ventilator, and as long as they think you might like boobs, boobs are going to be coming your way, so… I mean… I don’t know… Treat it like scenery? Something pretty to look at while you go about your job. Just… don’t stare. Glance. Yeah, it’s annoying that they think they can manipulate you with your shaft, but, the longer you go without giving in, probably the less intense the pressure will be?” Jon offers him a half-smile.

Kylo rolls his eyes a bit, glares at the door, and then says, “We should get back in there, right?”

“Yes, and if anyone asks why you were pulled away, smile, and say you’ve handled it. That’s mysterious but makes it seem like it’s not terribly serious.” Jon glances at the coffee cup, still in Kylo’s hand. “And… a lot of people drink alcohol because it makes uncomfortable social situations feel better…”

Kylo shakes his head. “No. Not here. Not surrounded by strangers.”

“Okay.” Jon steps toward the door. “Come on.”

 

* * *

Kinear doesn’t hover near him as the evening wears on. He breaks off quickly, and begins to circle through the room, a glass of wine in his hand, and if his wife is here, Kylo doesn’t know which of the ladies she is. He’s not interacting with any of the ladies more than any other one.

He does notice that Kinear is holding his drink, and he lifts it to his lips, and he makes a swallowing motion, but he’s not drinking. He moves around enough that no one notices the level of wine in his glass isn’t dropping, and by an hour into the night he’s acting drunk.

As he’s noticing that, a tiny woman, her head barely reaching his deltoid, sidles up next to him. She has light gray hair, the brightest blue eyes he’s ever seen, and a fairly simple, but elegant, gown of white silk and red lace.

“Master,” she says, bowing her head.

He knows who she has to be. “Lady Kinear.”

“Call me, Ellie.”

“Ellie. I had asked him to introduce me.”

“He may. Or may not. He did tell me to come over and introduce myself. Generally we circle separately. He won’t be seen with me unless it improves the outlook of the evening.”

“And will it improve the evening?”

“Not sure, yet. Right now, we cover twice as much ground, but there may be a time when he’ll do better if he looks so drunk his wife has to swoop in to ‘rescue’ him.”

“Do you do this a lot?”

She smiles up at him, eyes and face bright. “More this last year than the thirty before it, combined, but yes, a long time ago, we used to do this a lot. Granted, back then we weren’t old enough to convincingly play dottering. There’s not much being ninety-two is good for, but when you need to look like a harmless old bag of bones, it works wonders.”

“Ah.”

 

 

She takes his hand, and gently pats it. His eyes widen at that touch. They go slightly wider when she thinks at him, hard, _You’re doing fine. Keep smiling. They like this._

He blinks. _How do you know to do this?_

_Like I said, old bag of bones. Used to be you couldn’t go a thousand meters through the Senate without tripping on a Jedi. Think hard enough at one of them, and they’ll notice what you’re doing. Helps if you’re touching one._

_Did you used to work with them?_

_Not exactly. I’d occasionally need to chat with one without looking like I was saying anything._ She lets go of his hand. “Lovely party, Master.”

“Thank you.”

“I believe dinner is about to be served.”

He notices that there are people hovering near the fully set table. “I think you are right.” A tiny, shriveled memory of Lando’s wedding, when he was getting ready to lead them to the tables, springs to the front of his mind. He offers Lady Kinear his hand.

She smiles up at him. _Right instincts, wrong gal. Go find Lady Holthinne. She and her husband are the head of your newest colony, and ostensibly your guests of honor._ _Stick her on your right, him on your left, and pretend to be fascinated by her stories. Listen to what she’s saying. It’ll appear to be some stupid surface topic, flower breeding or the like, but_ listen _, understand what she’s telling you between the words, and respond accordingly._

_Thank you._

Ellie looks up at him and smiles. “Master.”

 

 

* * *

It’s not flower breeding.

In fact, if she’d been talking about flower breeding, he’d have had to work less hard to pretend to be interested. No, he wasn’t good with the plants at Luke’s school (To the point where he spent three years in charge of nothing but weed control, because plants he spent too much time with tended to die.), but he did work with them, and actually knows something about gardening.

Lady Holthinne is talking about… shit… he lost the track of the story at least six paragraphs ago. He’s trying to figure out what she may be saying between the words, but whatever it is, it’s _so_ far between the words he’s utterly clueless to what it may be.

It’s so far between, he can’t pull it out of her head, either.

It’s entirely possible she’s just something of a twit going on at length about… Her cousin’s son’s vlady team’s winning season. He’s not entirely sure what vlady is, other than, apparently some sort of game…

Oh… He offers her a little smile as he _finally_ gets a feel for what’s going on. Someone’s noticed the junjan token he wears. He doesn’t think of it as a game token any longer. It’s the symbol of the Maji, and that’s it, but somehow, somewhere, she got a story that indicated he likes games, so she’s talking to him about the only game she knows anything about.

He can’t find a deeper meaning, because she’s trying to get him comfortable enough with some sort of surface topic so she can move to a deeper one.

He does his best to smile in the right places, and look interested, and not, too visibly, check the chronometer every twenty seconds.

 

 

* * *

By dessert, (Which he makes a note to ask for again, it’s a rich custard, smooth and creamy, scented with rose petals and delicately almond-flavored. The taste is good, but the texture is squishier and more jiggly than he likes his food, but Rey’ll love it.) the flower breeding conversation has come out, and this time he actually has something to say, except…

Apparently, it’s some sort of code to figure out if he’s looking for a wife. Actually, more specifically, it’s a tentative feeler to see if she might end up with a grandchild as the next Master of the Order.

He supposes this is better than just bringing her daughters along and tossing them in his path. (He glances around the table, and is fairly sure at least fourteen of the women and five of the men are here for exactly that reason. Apparently, the rumor mill hasn’t focused down enough to know what it is he may be interested in having sex with. Kylo’s not sure if that’s a good thing or not.) But, the conversation is boring, and he couldn’t be less interested in whatever offspring this woman may have, let alone as a potential spouse.

“Unfortunately, every plant I’ve ever tended has _died_ shortly thereafter.”

Her eyes go shockingly wide, and he gets the sense that that was possibly _too_ emphatic of a response. (He can feel Ellie, three seats down, sniggering behind an effortlessly fascinated face as she talks to the man on her right. Apparently, she approved of his answer. Apparently, she also knows he’s already, so to speak, tending his own garden, and is beyond content with the flower in it.)

Lady Holtheinne doesn’t say anything about flowers after that.

 

 

* * *

He wonders, as he finishes the dessert, what Rey would think of this. He’ll tell her about it not nearly soon enough, so he knows she’ll learn about it, but… Would she enjoy something like this?

He may be standing around, feeling like a thumb without a hand, but he’s noticing that Kinear’s getting useful information, and he’s fairly sure Schiff, judging by how pleased he looks, is on the verge of getting a fourth colony, which isn’t a bad tally for one night. Let alone one night without a single shot fired.

This is certainly, from the feel of it, moving him and his interests in the right direction, and at least mentally that feels good, it’s just… hard and tiring and he knows he’s not good at it. This may be a ‘relaxed’ setting for the diplomat types around him, but it’s not for him.

Actually, it feels a lot like trying to learn pretty much any new skill he wasn’t naturally talented at. Worse, it feels like having to demonstrate a new skill he’s not particularly talented at, with a lot of people scrutinizing his every move.

He wonders how this would feel if he knew he had Rey keeping her eyes on her back, watching the way people watch him… Defending him the way Ellie is Kinear.

It’d likely be easier. At least he could keep up appearances and both of them could be snarking away in each other’s heads about what’s going on, so more amusing. And, he’ll admit, he wouldn’t, at all, mind seeing her dressed up for something like this. Hell, if she was going to be at one of these things, he might as well see about adding some music. If he’s going to make himself a liar, he might as well make her one, too.

It’s a pretty fantasy, him, her, both of them dressed up, mingling, dancing. Playing the game with words and looks, instead of blasters and fighters… But it’s a fantasy. He doesn’t enjoy the game, and he can’t really imagine she would, too.

He wonders how many of these things his father sat through before he gave up. He can remember him almost shouting, that hushed tone he’d use when he wanted to yell, but he knew his son was a horrible sleeper and didn’t want to wake him up. (He always woke up as soon as he felt the fight start, long before words, at any volume, were ever spoken.) “If you wanted a prince, _your worship_ , you should have married one. Gutter trash and scoundrels aren’t made for fancy parties!”

“No one expects you to be a prince!”

“You do! You expect me to know which of the fourteen forks to use, and not to drink too much, and not to be impolite, and not to tell a good joke, or laugh if someone else has enough balls to tell one.”

“Han…”

“No! Find a trained pony to take to these things, you’ll be less disappointed, and I’ll be less frustrated.”

 

 

* * *

This really shouldn’t be _this_ hard.

He could have taken apart twenty of his training droids with his bare hands and not been this tired.

Quick check of the chronometer, four hours have gone by.

Jon sidles over to him, another cup of coffee in hand. Kylo eyes it when he takes it, but doesn’t drink it. He’ll be jittery the rest of the night if he does.

“You okay?” Jon asks, looking at the people around them, eyes warm, face open and pleasant. He’s been happily slipping through this crowd, keeping up what looks like effortless conversation, and from everything Kylo can feel, genuinely enjoying this.

“How obviously am I lying if I say, yes?” he replies through the fakest smile of the night.

“Enough.”

“Why is this so hard?”

Jon’s expression is kind. “Because you’re the only person in this room who didn’t train in it from shortly after birth? My mother met my dad when he was training to be an officer. The Empire wouldn’t confirm a promotion to the rank of Major or higher unless you knew how to ‘behave in public.’ They actually had practice parties and dances so they could learn how to properly do things like this. You’ve never done anything like that, right? That’s what learning languages and floating things meant?”

“Yes.”

“Well…” Jon looks around them. “Decorum, small talk, being effortlessly interesting and interested, charm, all of these are learned skills.”

That’s actually comforting.

“You can probably skip out in another hour.”

That’s significantly more comforting.

 

 

* * *

Schiff joins him half an hour later, the grin on his face is so wide it’s dwarfing his other features. “Nine,” he says. No other comment or explanation. Just “Nine,” and a massive grin.

He doesn’t need to say more. Kylo nods at him, and smiles back. Probably the least fake smile of the night.

Compared to what he’d have to do to get nine colonies any other way… Yeah, this is tiring and painful, but it’s not a full out war. A little flare of hope sparks. Maybe Rey’ll join him at these things if he explains they literally save lives…

Lay it out like that… Like… It’s a battle, both of them, back to back, defending each other against… uh… vaguely worded double-entendres, staking out the future of the Order… She might go for that.

Maybe.

Thinking of the battle he avoids by doing this brings to mind the battles he may be setting up. Then the real smile spreads over his face. Nine. He’s got nine new colonies that are going to change alliance, and once they do, they’re going to need someone to _protect_ them. And unlike standing around with a tiny cup of coffee in his hand, talking to strangers about odds and ends, he’s _beyond_ capable and competent there.

He’s still counting the minutes until he can leave, though. Just in a somewhat more positive mood as he does it.

 

 

* * *

Done. _Finally._

Part of him wants to immediately strip off the second he’s in his room. Get out of these clothes, get back to himself, and then shift home and cuddle up against his wife. _Done_ for the night.

But he knows he’s not done for the night, not yet.

He closes his eyes, letting himself just _be_ for a moment. He’s not sure if he’s called her, or if she just knows to come, but he feels the glow before he opens his eyes and sees it. “Comments?”

“It looks good.” Leia looks him up and down.

“Kinear called me Prince Ben of Alderaan today.”

“You could have been.”

“No. You made sure of that long before I knew it was an option.”

She half shrugs. Dropping her, and his, claim to the throne brought her a somewhat easier political situation. “Being Princess Leia was never good for much but irking your father.”

“I’m not talking about the title. Even if I had it, it’d be useless to me, because you didn’t teach me how to be _Prince Ben_. You built alliances all throughout the galaxy, talked men out of fortunes to support you, got people to literally _die_ for you, and you taught me how to do none of it. You didn’t think I’d need those skills?”

She’s staring out at the skies beyond him right now, seeing… He doesn’t know. A million failed attempts at fixing the galaxy, maybe. Or a horde of dead friends. Her eyes slip back to him. “I fervently hoped you wouldn’t. I was trying to make sure you’d be an adult in a galaxy where you wouldn’t have to convince people to die for you. This isn’t… fun.”

“Trying to do it without ever having learned how to do it makes it even less so,” he says through gritted teeth, and begins to strip off his Emperor-wear. “Who the hell was Ben supposed to be? I’m not trained for _this._ Kenobi, _your last hope,_ ” his voice is sharp as he says that, “knew how to do things like negotiate and be charming. I _don’t._ Was Ben just a super-soldier for the New Republic? A hired blade?”

She stares at him as he pulls off the vest. “Maybe.” She watches him move through his rooms. Body too big, not exactly graceful, the aura of power and Force that radiates off him like the heat of his skin. His size, the black clothing, the dark Force, all of it reminds her of one thing, the thing she always feared, since only a few moments after she felt the first spark of Ben’s life, his dark spreading all through it. “Not Vader. Ben was supposed to be not Vader.” She’s rubbing her lips together, hard, her body, or at least the remembered glow of it, fighting hard to keep her words inside. “That… You told us about your grandfather. When you were little. ‘Grandpa talks to me!’ You only had one grandfather that could have done that, and… And he wouldn’t. Not…” She’s mirroring his lip roll back at him, or he’s been mirroring hers for years. “Not… Like that. Not… after he changed. Someone… was out there, and he knew enough to… ‘Grandpa says I should.’ ‘Grandpa says it’s okay to…’ yell, fight, hurt things… Just. No.” She’s shaking her head, staring at him, seeing another tall, dark man. A tall, dark man she never saw the face of, only the mask.

“I sent you to the only man in the entire universe who ever got your grandfather to act like a human being. I didn’t think he could be turned. I told Luke not to go. Told him to run away. And I wasn’t entirely sure he had been turned when you started to talk about Grandpa. His fucking ghost came back to wreak havoc on us. It wasn’t enough…” She’s looking up at him, eyes _hot,_ temper sparking. He knows that look. He’s aimed it at many people and a host of inanimate objects over the years. “He killed _everyone_ in the universe who mattered to me in one _second_. _All_ of them. My parents. My friends. My fiancée. All of them were on Alderaan, and they _all died!_ He held me in place and made me watch them die. That he might have come back just to piss on the future and twist the knife further… I could believe that of him.

“So, no, I didn’t care what Ben became as long as it wasn’t _him._ ”

There likely was a time when that could have impressed Kylo. It he’d been hit with that as a teenager, it would have resonated, but… Now? She’s at least a decade too late, now. “And that’s why I couldn’t go fly with Dad? You didn’t want me to become Vader, who used to be Anakin Skywalker, who was once a Jedi, so you sent me off to become a Jedi. The most notorious Sith to ever walk the damn galaxy, the man who was the _definition_ of failed Jedi training, who you were afraid I was going to emulate, and you sent me to… follow his footsteps exactly? Get trained by someone who was too attached and didn’t know how to do the job properly? Everyone says you’re better at planning than that. I’ve never really been sure, because from my seat it looks like most of the battles you won, _General_ , you won because the Force loves a stupid bloody fool with too much cause and not enough common sense!”

She’s glaring up at him. “I’ve done the best I could with what I had, which was never enough. Give me a fleet, and I’ll plan a battle that’d make your head spin.”

“You had one, and I _destroyed_ it! I outfought you in every battle we went up against each other, except the last one.” That bursts out of him before he can stop it. That’s not where he wanted to go with this. So he pulls back and redirects. “You’d always do that with Dad, too. He’d get you with a real point and an insult, and you’d go for the insult.”

“The real point was meaningless. You had too much Force talent not to train!”

“You didn’t.”

“Please. I never had—“

“I was there, remember! I watched the missiles fly past my ship and blow your command into bits. Everyone else on the bridge died. Their corpses gored by myriad shards of shrapnel. But… you didn’t. What magic could have possibly accounted for that? Somehow every piece of exploding ship missed your body, you got hurtled into the abyss of space, depressurized, flash frozen, and then, magically, got _back into_ the ship, without depressurizing the whole thing, and instead of every cell of your body ripped to shreds from the ice crystals, you just got _better_ , in less than two days _._ That’s _not_ how normal people live. All of the _normal_ people on that bridge _died!_ ”

She’s glaring at him, and he’s glaring back, just as hard.

“What was Ben supposed to be? Don’t… give me this shit about not Vader. If you’d wanted not Vader…” His eye is twitching and his lip trembling. “You could have come home, or taken me with you. You could have kept me near, and taught me to be a senator or something. You could have trained me to be a General. I’ve _obviously_ got an aptitude for breaking shit and killing people! Or let me stay with Dad. Let me learn to be a pilot. The Force knows you’ve had use for them over the years!”

He sneers, feeling the disgust pouring off of him. “I captured your ‘best pilot in the Resistance.’ He loved you. General Organa, Leia, the substitute for the mom he lost. He was so proud to be picked for that mission. Apparently, he’d been flying for you for more than fifteen years at that point. Dark, wavy hair, dark eyes, he’s too short, but you hadn’t seen me in person in more than eight years, so there’s no way you’d know how tall I’d gotten, a little older, but not that much. You grabbed a substitute, but that could have been me.”

She’s right up in front of him, glaring up at him. They never did this in real life, and Kylo’s not sure if that’s a good thing, or not. “And lost you? Just like everyone else I got too close to? Thirty-six of us got away from Crait. Over the last ten years, and you should fucking _know_ because you killed half of them, I lost nine hundred and ninety-seven of every thousand of my troops.”

“Yeah, well, stuffing me off into the middle of nowhere with Luke didn’t exactly keep me, now did it? And if I’d been with you, or Dad, I’d likely have been _on your side_ once you needed to start Resisting. Like I said to Dad, how much worse could it have been?”

He feels all of the lies and shields peel away from her, feels the force of her words, the emotional intensity, every ounce of the mourning she never allowed herself, bottled up for decades and distilled into the worst decision of her and his life. “You could be _dead_. What was Ben supposed to be? _Alive_. Ben was supposed to be alive! And if I had to hide him away and bury him under a ton of books in a backwater in the middle of nowhere, then that’s where he’d be, _alive!_ You are the only person I couldn’t bear to bury. I gave birth to you. I felt your first breath against my skin. I felt it the instant you became… you… So… No. It just wasn’t going to happen. You are the _only_ thing in the universe that _had_ to outlive me!”

Kylo feels that like a punch and an embrace all at once, and a long shuddering breath leaches from him.

Leia also releases, her own tension edging away.

For a moment, they’re both quiet, feeling that revelation.

Then Leia says, “Luke said you liked reading and studying and… I always kept your poems.” She taps the glowing memory of one of her rings. “I had one folded up in my ring. Wore it every day. For a while there, it looked like you might have had the makings of a scholar. You know we weren’t supposed to send you presents. Luke didn’t want the other kids to get jealous, but every book I could find on the Jedi, I sent to him for the library, because he said you liked reading them. If you could have been happy in a library, I would have been happy with you there.

“But every call. Every recorded letter. Every visit. That was another chance of someone finding you. When you were fourteen, things started heating up. The First Order was starting to really gather adherents and… We were fighting again. Half the fucking Republic was already getting coy trying to play both sides of the game, and too many of them didn’t care if the First Order was bad news, as long as they were strong enough to keep the border regions secure and… That’s why I didn’t visit in person after you were fifteen. I knew they were watching me. I couldn’t find the track they had on me, but I could feel it.

“Snoke wasn’t just hiding in the back of your head. I know he got to me, and I think he got to Luke, because that’s the only answer that makes sense, and… And he wasn’t going to track me to you.”

Kylo blinks. “You think he got to Luke?” That’s… just… Luke? The Jedi _Master_? Luke who is still a thousand times bigger than real life to him. Luke who is _still_ his _ideal_ of Jedi power.

Leia nods. “The man who could see the good in _Vader_ , after twenty minutes with him, twenty minutes fighting for his life against him, not just sees it, but believes in it so intensely that he could _turn_ him, attacks his nephew, who he’s been raising for more than a decade, in his sleep, based on a _premonition._ Really? _No!_ That did not happen. Not Luke. Not just as himself. That’s why he cut himself off from the Force. If Snoke could manipulate him to do that… He closed himself off to make sure it couldn’t happen again.”

Kylo doesn’t know what to do with that. It… fits.

“He was there, clawing his way through your mind and ours and… He was there, hiding, shifting things. I hoped Luke could hide you. I hoped he could protect you. I hoped he could teach you to protect yourself. Nowhere in the galaxy was far enough away to set you out of his reach so… I gave you to the person most able to shield you.”

“It wasn’t enough.”

“ _I know!”_ She spits at him, voice ragged. “Like you said, _I was there; I_ _remember._ But you are _still alive_! And I wouldn’t have picked this path for you, but you’ve got a path to walk, and for almost everyone who fought for me, that’s not true. You looked at Poe and saw a surrogate son…” She shakes her head, an inelegant snort falling from her lips. “If that’d been true, he’d have never set foot near anything even vaguely dangerous. Your father was an adult, so I couldn’t make him hide, and I couldn’t turn him into a diplomat, so I had to live with him in dangers, but I got you and Luke out of danger, and in the end that’s the only fucking battle I ever won, so I’m not going to feel bad for it.”

And he doesn’t know what to say to that. For a good long minute they’re both staring at each other, and he’s finally seeing her, really her, and how much Han was right when he said he was a mirror, and how wrong.

But he’s not a mirror of Leia’s light. Whatever light he has is his own, or maybe Rey’s, or... He can feel the understanding opening. He’s the mirror of _Vader’s_ light. His love, if love is the word for it, for his son, his _family,_ let him make the decision that broke him from Palpatine. Vader’s love was his salvation, and he knows that’s what’s pulled him from the path of destruction to a path of construction.

He’s the mirror of Leia’s dark. Of her need for more, of her constant, unending dedication to fighting that which is for the sake of that what could be, her unending want and attachment to a better galaxy, of the anger that kept her going, day after day after day, after she lost everything that mattered to her, of the fear that made her hide him away, of the shields and sarcasm she used to keep people from knowing the her under the image. He’s her mirror all right, but not, at all, of anything _light_.

“You never trained because you knew you’d fail. You couldn’t not _want._ ”

She half shrugs. “I knew I was better suited to politics than piety.”

“Better suited to changing the galaxy than accepting it.”

She inclines her head at that. “Dream the impossible dream. You probably won’t get it, but you can move things closer to it.”

He holds his hands out, gesturing not just to himself, but everything around him. “Is this not closer?”

“It is.”

“And could you not see this coming? I know you have at least some prescience. Both you and Luke spoke of it.”

“I could see it, some of it, at least. Toward the end.”

His lips rub together, hard, and pulls his hand through his hair. “Then why did you leave? Was it not blatantly clear I need all the fucking help I can get?”

“I’m still here. Just ask.”

His gaze is withering. “Be a diplomat for me? Oh, wait, you’re too fucking dead for that. Talk people into joining my side? Too fucking dead for that, too. Find me allies? Too _fucking dead!_ Use you’re thirty million contacts across the entire galaxy to watch my back? _Too fucking dead!_ I don’t need a ghost. I didn’t need holovids, or letters, or… I needed…” he can’t make himself say it. His voice won’t hold and the words won’t form. He never needed her at arm’s length, or the image of her, or just her voice. He needed his mom, near him, he needed hugs, and to be petted, and to have regular, actual, physical _contact_ with her. He turns away from her, looking out to the tear-blurred stars.

He sees her reflection behind him, and the look in her eyes. He’s seen it in his own, and he can feel it, not sure if the sentiment is hers or his, but she’s the one who puts words to it. “The worst pain in the galaxy is needing someone to be something they can’t be, isn’t it, _Ben._ ”

He inhales deeply, and exhales, long and slow, then turns to face her, “Apparently, _Mom_.” He’s so tired. Done. Ready to just collapse into bed, and with any luck, with Rey wrapped around him.

Leia’s not done, yet. She can’t be what he needs, but she can be useful, on one level or another. “Jon’s trustworthy. Keep him close, listen to him, and raise him up as high as he can go. Use him to find others like him. Kinear and Schiff aren’t. As long as you’re going the way they want to go, they’ll get you there. The moment you aren’t, they’ll put a knife in your back. Find more men like Jon, and watch Kinear and Schiff.”

He rolls his eyes. “I knew that.”

“It’s good to have confirmation though, isn’t it?”

He nods, a little. “It is.”

“I can’t get you my contacts, not any longer, but… If you can get him to work with you, Threepio knows all of them. He knows who to talk to, when, about what, and how. Most of what I did over the years, diplomatically, I was able to do because I had an extremely well-versed protocol droid next to me.”

“Wonderful. Did I blow his circuits five times before I was talking, or only four? Even when I was a child, he didn’t want to be in the same room with me, so these days, I figure he’ll be up to working with me shortly after the galaxy burns out.”

Leia doesn’t tell him he’s wrong. Not exactly. “It’s easy to get paranoid this high up, and it’s easy to lay too much trust on people who are useful.”

He sighs. “Which is more dangerous?”

“Trust is dangerous to you, paranoia is dangerous to everyone else, but eventually comes back around to you. You get to pick your poison, though, in my experience trust brings out the best in people. It’s a gift that, especially when you can match it with the ability to tell who’s worth trusting, pays good dividends.”

He blinks, tucking that away. Then he nods at her, once, and pulls himself to his cottage on Lirium, where Rey is, because he’s had every possible thing he can take for one day, and he’s _done._    

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not going back on Jon being interested in men. (I probably don't have to spell this out here, but on the off chance some of you are confused...) In the tradition of Capt. Jack Harkness, Jon is interested in pretty much anything and everyone. In a universe of near infinite possibilities, Jon's been enthusiastically enjoying the options. 
> 
> Does this matter to the plot? Eh? Maybe, a little, eventually? Mostly it's just rounding out his character.


	38. Prepare For Battle: Prepare For Peace

9/5/1

 

Given how quickly he was able to get formalwear, and informal wear, Kylo would have to admit that he’s a bit surprised to just be getting his armor, now.

He doesn’t exactly ask Jon why it took so long, but apparently, as he’s showing it off, he feels the curiosity.

He taps the outfit in front of him, which looks quite a bit like Kylo’s traditional command blacks. “Because this _works._ ”

And of all the possible reasons for armor taking a while _that_ strikes him as the best of the bunch.

“First off, you move _a lot_ when you fight. Every joint moves in pretty much every direction it can go, and a few I didn’t think they could go in. You fight with fist, elbow, knee, foot, head, and saber. That meant I couldn’t use a lot of plate in this.” He taps the shin of the trousers. “Shins, thighs, forearms, and arms. Besides your mask, that’s the only hard, solid surface in this thing. You can use them block hits as well as attack with them.” He pokes the chest of the tunic, but it doesn’t give under his finger. “I had to go back, way back, to find something for this. The under layer is the traditional tight mesh we use in the Stormtrooper armor. It won’t stop a blaster or lightsaber, but it will spread out the damage, and it’ll seal tight if you cut it, keep your internals internal if need be. Next layer is hundreds of tiny plates overlapping each other like scales. It’ll bend and flex with you, and again, it won’t stop a blast, but it’ll deflect or absorb a _lot_ of it. At least ninety percent of the hit won’t get to your skin because of this. Top layer looks like wool, but it’s a heat and electric dampening layer. Anything that burns or jolts is going to have a hard time getting through, and you won’t have to worry about your outfit catching fire because someone hit you with a laser weapon.” He taps the gloves. “Your current gloves have a layer of heat protection. These have that, and a fine mesh of the same material that makes up the scales. It’s even more flexible than the scales, you’ll have perfect range of motion in your fingers and wrists, and this’ll bleed off probably seventy percent of a hit.”

“So I don’t want to attempt to catch a blade in my hand, but I shouldn’t be too worried about accidently burning myself with my saber.”

Jon thinks about it. “If you _absolutely_ had to, you could, but don’t hold it long, and don’t do it twice.”

Kylo tucks that away. If he absolutely had to catch a blade, he’d do it anyway, armor or not, and trust his Force to keep his hand attached long enough to do what it needed to do. “You said this actually works. I assume part of what you’re saying is that our other armor doesn’t?”

Jon just looks at him. “You have to know the Stormtrooper armor is designed to be more stylish than protective. It’s a uniform that provides the image of anonymous invulnerability.”

Kylo knows that his troopers don’t exactly seem to shrug off hits to their armor, but… “You mean it’s designed to be useless?”

“ _No._ ” He can feel that _useless_ actually annoys Jon. “It’s designed to look good, make it easy to tell rank at a glance, intimidate whomever you may fight against, and keep your men feeling anonymous, which goes a _long_ way to getting them to follow orders without thinking about it too hard. It’s just not designed to stop blaster hits, or lasers, or well, much of anything.”

Kylo thinks about that. He has way more Stormtroopers than he ever puts on the ground, so it’s true that most of the time, they’re just here, in one of his ships, perfectly safe, in their uniforms, so… Maybe they don’t exactly have to be in top-of-the-line protective gear.

He thinks about his fleet, and about the rest of the things Snoke didn’t exactly like spending money on.

Then he looks at his armor. “How much did this cost?”

“Slightly more than a mech droid, sir. Though part of that is a scale issue. If I were making this en masse, it’d be less expensive per unit.”

He sighs. That’s a really good reason to not have every one of his troopers wearing this. “Would I be correct in assuming that you could design armor, for the Stormtroopers, that works, as armor?”

“Yes, and I have. I had to scale the original design back to fit the budget. All Snoke really wanted was a slight redesign of the Imperial armor, which just like what we’ve got, was made to look good, not actually protect people.”

Kylo nods. “How much better could it be if I doubled your budget?”

Jon taps Kylo’s armor. “Not this good, but you wouldn’t have your men getting knocked out by an overgrown rodent with a rock.”

Apparently, Jon remembered the ‘news holos’ from the Battle of Endor. Kylo does, too. He supposes that ‘These are the blood-thirsty monsters who killed your father all celebrating their victory’ would lend a somewhat different feel to the images than “And there’s Uncle Chewie! He commandeered that AT-ST and saved our lives!”

“I’ll see what I can do. Ideally, they’d all have functional armor, but if you can give me the cost projections for getting my men who are actually in danger into something that’ll let them take a hit or two from a blaster without getting killed, I’d appreciate it.”

He feels Jon smile, sees it, too. “This is what I’m actually supposed to be in charge of.”

“Getting bored of being my personal tailor?”

“No. But this,” he touches the armor, and looks toward Kylo’s closet. He knows what’s hanging in there, “is art, and I love art. Speaking of which, I’ve got a new redesign on the formal wear for you, but Snoke hired me to do a job, specifically designing body armor, and there is something to be said for doing the job I was hired for.”

Kylo can feel the professional pride. “You want to build the kind of gear that keeps them safe.”

Jon smiles a little. “It’d be nice. That said, I know that you don’t have infinite resources, and the amount it costs to make someone hit proof, and what you can afford are different things, but… I can do better than I have, if I had more resources at my disposal.”

“Get me design specs, and I’ll see what we can squeeze.” He thinks about that for another moment. Most of his men spend most of their time on his ships, where they do nothing even remotely approaching dangerous. “You said part of the point of the armor was making them feel anonymous?”

Frakes nods. “Yes. PsyOps did a few studies on it. Well, Imperial PsyOps. Hux used those reports to hone his training methods, take the Imperial findings a step further. The less any given person feels like a given person… anonymous… part of a crowd… the more likely they are to do whatever you want them to do. It’s… a trick to overcome most people’s aversions to hurting others. It helps to make it easier to keep up the idea that you’re a good person, and some other, nameless, faceless person does all of the messy stuff.”   

Kylo’s nodding slowly. “That’s why they have their names stripped.”

“And everything else. Easier to do whatever it is if no one knows it’s you.”

Kylo drums his finger against his hip. “What would it cost to put soldiers stationed shipboard into uniforms? Not armor. Take the stuff we’ve currently got, scrap it, or use it to build better armor, and put anyone who’s not likely to get into a firefight into something like an officer’s outfit? Something where their faces show.”

Frakes runs the numbers in his head. “Short term, it’ll spike costs, longer term… A pair of trousers is cheaper to replace than a thigh guard that got cracked because someone wasn’t careful enough with a forklift and a supplies crate. Sizing is easier, too. Fabric bends and stretches, armor doesn’t. Downside, I can’t use all that much of what we’ve currently got to make better armor. It’s the thinnest, lightest grade of plasteel I could get. Double plate it, and it’ll be too heavy, and still not strong enough.”

“Can we sell it? Use it for… anything… else?”

“There’s someone out there who wants any and everything. And there may be something else we can use this for, I just don’t know what it is.”

“Okay. Get me cost projections and sketches for enlisted uniforms, too. We’re taking the masks off unless they’re in combat. I want them personally attached to… all of it. Their jobs, their comrades, what they do, how it reflects on the rest of us.”

Frakes smiles a little at that. “I can do that.”

“Good…” Kylo’s watching Frakes, seeing him, thinking about what he said about _what he was hired to do_ and remembering his mother’s words. “Honestly, no… telling me what you think I want to hear, do you like this job?”

Jon looks worried. “May I ask why?”

“You said, ‘what I was hired to do…’ I can likely find other armor designers. I’m not sure I can find someone else to do what you do for me…”

“I assume you mean beyond tailoring?”

Kylo just gives him a look.

“What do you see me doing?”

Kylo blinks. “I don’t have a word for it. Advisor? Chief Diplomat? The person who knows the ins and outs of how to build this thing I’ve only got a vague idea of in my head… My designer.”

Jon thinks that over for a moment. He taps the armor in front of them. “I’m good at this. I… as best as I know, am better at it than anyone else on this ship, but I know I’m not the best in the galaxy, and I may not be the best in Order. I’m the one with the most access to you.”

“That’s fair. Would you like to be something… else?”

“Not until I’ve found someone who can design the kind of armor you’re looking for, better than I can. Then, yes, I would like to be more.”

“Good. Hire your replacement. And then join my general staff, General Frakes.”

Frakes shakes his head a little.

“Jon?”

“No. I’ll hire my replacement, and I’ll do what you want, but if I join your general staff, there are going to be issues, and… I’ll do my job better if I don’t have people cozying up to me, trying to get me to do it the way they want it done. Kinear and Schiff have already noticed me, and as soon as the others do, they’ll all be sidling over with little jobs and bits and pieces they want done. So… Lieutenant Colonel Frakes, and if you ever decide to set up a diplomatic corps, I’ll take it, but until then, if I’m on your staff, I’m the most junior officer on your staff, and they will do whatever they can to use me.”

“I need a diplomatic corps. Could you set one up?”

Frakes laughs, a little, “In my copious spare time, sure. How about this, for right now, let me get a new head of your tactical design group. Then let me do enough research to find out what’s actually involved in a diplomatic corps. I’ll go through everything we still have from back in the Imperial days when Officer Decorum classes were a thing, and Palpatine had his own pet senators and a slew of diplomats working every system in the galaxy. Then I’ll sort through your people, see if we’ve got anyone even suited to take a whack at something like this, and if I can get that far without the rest of your general staff noticing and either trying to stop me or subvert me, I’ll build you a diplomatic corps.”

Kylo smiles. “In your copious spare time.”

“Yes.” Jon nods. “What was the final count from the dinner? I saw Schiff grinning like he just got a promotion at the end of it.”

“Nine new colonies. Not finalized, yet, but in the works.”

“Then I better be quick about finding a replacement.”

“I’d certainly appreciate it.”

“And you’re going to need more Emperor-wear if this is something you do regularly.”

“I probably will. But, like with the armor, go, find me someone who’s an as good or better tailor to make the rest of it.”

Jon smirks at that. “So, we’re building palaces, then?”

“They tell me I’m four and a half years out on the first wave of new dreadnaughts. So, yes, I’m building palaces. They won’t be ready soon, but we’re moving there.”

“Good. Build me a nice one, because if we’re serious about this, somewhere that doesn’t look like it was intentionally designed to give people nightmares would come in handy.”

“If you think it matters, I’ll give you the specs before we go into production, and you can modify them to suit your needs.”

Jon inclines his head. “That’s a good starting point. Build something designed to be a hub of working with and getting along with other people. A place that’s not a huge floating weapon.” Jon taps his fingers, thinking, there has to be a use for the weapon encrusted nightmare, even if they aren’t actively fighting. “You’re always looking for ways to increase the value of what we’re doing.”

“Yes.”

“We’ve got space. A two-thirds of this ship’s cargo holds are empty, and four-fifths of its personnel capacity. We’ve got guns a plenty, more troops than we know what to do with, more than we need, honestly. We can dock most systems’ entire fleets in here. We can offer neutral meeting territory. Let people use our space to hash out their own squabbles. They talk. We provide security. Everyone’s happy. Trade deals... We’ve got people and storage, we can provide escrow for goods or credit.”

“And when they come to take advantage of our space, you can get a feel for who to hire away from their local corporations and systems,” Kylo says, seeing another angle on this.

“And I can get a feel for who’s who in this game, and who’s any good at it.” 

 

 

* * *

“Jon had a good idea.”

Rey looks across their meal to him. “Jon often seems to have good ideas.”

He nods. “He’s suggesting we offer the extra space on the _Supremacy_ as neutral meeting territory.”

She smiles at him, thinks about it, and nods. “That could be valuable.”

“I’d think. Especially for people who… can’t access the normal ebbs and flows of the different local legal systems.”

She raises an eyebrow. “You think I may know someone who could use information like that?”

“Possibly, or pass it on to someone else who could.”

She knows he’s talking about Chewie. “You could… try talking to him directly.”

Kylo shakes his head. He’s seen the _Falcon_ around, seen Chewie at a distance even, and knows that Chewie knows he’s here, but… “No… It’s… no.”

Rey just looks at him. “He doesn’t hate you. I know you’ve been close enough to feel it.”

He blinks. “He should.” He rubs his lips together, trying to sort out all of this, because there are a lot of feelings and layers and levels to it. His breath comes a little faster, and his lips clamp down tighter. He can’t make himself say it, barely make himself think it, but Rey takes his hand and gives him a comforting squeeze.

“I think he gets to decide for himself who to hate.”

Kylo blinks at that, too.

She strokes his face. “And maybe it would be easier if he hated you, but he doesn’t, so…”

He swallows hard, and shakes his head. She kisses him gently, her lips on his, her fingers ghosting after them. “Say it, Kylo, you can give it voice.”

He releases the hard press of lip to lip, and they’re trembling. He shakes his head again, clamping his lips together. His body won’t let those words, feelings out.

She kisses him again. _It will be okay. You can think it, you can say it, and all that’ll happen is me listening. Try, love, try._

Kylo’s eyes are tearing, and his lips rubbing together hard, and for a second she hears the start of his voice, but he clamps it down.

_Try, love._

He stares up at the ceiling. His body won’t let him say it, but his mind starts, _I…_ He blinks, hard, and now his lips relax a little because he’s so close to tears that his voice can’t betray him. Words might form, but they won’t be intelligible.

_I’ve got you._ She stands up, settling behind him, holding him near. _Literally. Let it go._

When the thoughts break free they do so in a rush, all tumbling out fast and on top of each other. Just like his tears. _He never hurt me. Never did me any wrong. Didn’t abandon me. Didn’t get my hopes up. Didn’t ignore me. He didn’t lie to me. He never made me any promises he didn’t keep. And I took the one thing that mattered more to him than anything else in the galaxy away from him, and he didn’t deserve it, and I cannot bear to be forgiven by him for that. I am not sorry I killed Han Solo. I don’t see any other way we get to here, and here matters. We need to be here. So, that was his fate and my destiny and we moved through it, and… That’s that. But I cannot be forgiven by_ him _. Not for that._

She strokes his hair. He almost never talks about what he thinks/feels about having killed his father, so she just stands next to him, pets him, and lets him be. She’s not going to push any harder on this than she already did.

They’ve got time.

She kisses the top of his head. “I’ll pass it on.”

He nods through tear blurred eyes.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so today I finished up the rough draft of every chapter of Rumors/Gossip. I think we're coming in at 64 chapters, so twenty-ish left to go. Obviously, things'll morph and change as I continue to re-read and re-edit, but, as of now, the basic shape of the tale is in place. 
> 
> And oh, loves, are you going to enjoy what's left to come. (Huge, toothy grin.)


	39. Prepare For The Future

9/19/1

 

With the legal wrangling marching full force toward the Order picking up nine new colonies, or, at least, ‘offering protection and assistance’ as said colonies ‘declare their independence’ in exchange for ‘a considerable percentage of any and all goods and materials produced by said colony’ and ‘complete and total access of any people on said colony to the Order’s recruiting centers’ it’s becoming immensely clear to Kylo that his commanders really, truly, honestly believe that this _meeting with people, explaining why they want to work with the Order, how it will benefit them_ thing is going to work out well for them.

He’s the one who makes the leap of deciding that if he’s serious about _people_ and not systems, that, well… He’s got people coming out his ears here, and that he could, maybe… attempt to… possibly… meet some of them.

A bit more than two years after Holdo slammed her ship through the _Supremacy_ they are finally back to their pre-attack numbers and are getting close to surpassing that number. The ship itself can hold a crew of twenty-five million, though Kylo thinks it’d be beyond insane to put that many people on a ship.

Eight million, tops. That’s as many of his people as he wants stationed full time in one ship. And, in time he’ll have the number on the _Supremacy_ down to whatever the smallest number who can keep it running smoothly is, and then he’ll use it for transport, cargo, and hopefully as a giant floating castle of neutral territory for other people to use.

For right now though, he’s got a new class of sub-adults moving onboard to take a rotation through the flight training school, and, well… He’s meeting people, and they’re people, so he might as well meet them.

There’s no possible way he’s going to meet all 3.9 million people on this ship, but he can at least welcome his new troops and maybe come up with some way to at least allow himself to be seen by the older ones.

 

 

* * *

Technically speaking, sub-adults are any member of the Order to have settled into the far side of puberty, but not yet hit twenty years of age. (Twenty being what the Empire, and then the New Republic, and then the First Order, and now the Order consider full, legal, adulthood. Granted, every system and planet has their own variation on the theme of adulthood, as well. Also granted, ‘adulthood’ is a beyond nebulous concept in an organization where anyone who can do the job, is allowed to do the job. As of this point in time, if there’s something in the Order only ‘adults’ are allowed to do, Kylo doesn’t know what it might be.)

This particular group are all being trained as pilots, and have done well enough on their testing that, assuming they master their ships and continue to show competency in quick thinking and command decisions, will be shunted into the rising officer program. They’re all somewhere in the sixteen to eighteen-year-old range, and looking nervous and excited in their training blues.

There are forty of them in the group, but he’s barely aware of thirty-nine of them. There’s a boy, and from everything he can feel, with the exception of him and Rey, he’s the brightest, strongest Force signature he’s felt in… since his knights died. He’s brought four children to Rey now, but this one… He smirks a little. Of course. Rey got Critt recently, so… of course this new one would have to flow into his orbit.

He stutters through saying hello to them, wishing them well in their training, and how he’s looking forward to seeing them do great things as they continue to train and gain useful skills.

He can’t tear his eyes off the boy.

He’s a ginger, like Hux, pale skin and bright orange hair. Tall and slender, too. In all the years and all the faces, he’s the only other one Kylo’s ever seen, but that’s where the resemblance ends. Someone branded the boy, or maybe tattooed. He’s too far away to tell for sure. An intricate twisty design trails from under his right eye to the middle of his cheek. Many of the former slaves they get have some sort of mark on them, but rarely is it one so visible and painful.

When he finishes his rather unfocused “Welcome to the Order” speech, he pulls their officer aside, and says, “The ginger, what’s his name?”

“McGy, Jacen.”

“Have him gather his things and come to my rooms. I have use for him.”

Jacen stares at him, eyes mild, but unblinking. Kylo doesn’t feel any fear from him, and that intrigues him.

 

 

* * *

In his office, Kylo reads Jacen’s file. He doesn’t usually take the time to do this, just talks to them for a moment or two and then takes them to Rey, but… He’s _almost_ an adult, and he’s inches from starting atmo-free flight training and from there having his own squadron.

It’s possible he might not want to lose, or postpone that.

And… though Kylo’s loathe to admit this, he fucking _needs_ pilots. He’s scouring the damn galaxy for them, and giving one up _hurts._ Though… He’s old enough, and Poe’s there, so… he probably doesn’t have to entirely give up getting this kid trained to fly. Maybe Padme’ll steal a ship for the kid. Kylo rolls his eyes a little at that, wondering if he can get that lie to stick.

And, though he’s even more loathe to admit it, a gangly, pale kid with a lot of raw Force talent, who might want to be a pilot is _not_ a kid he’s going to pull away from here if he doesn’t want to go.

Like any person who’s been in the Order for a little more than a year, his file is slim. He joined up in Cartuum, part of a group of eighteen slaves who all came in at once. He tested well at spatial perception, coordination, the ability to use both hands and feet independently of each other, lightning fast reflexes, Kylo looks at those numbers and knows that no one, on their own, has reflexes that fast, the kid has some level of Force prescience, and in the top 90% of the intelligence tests. Not too great at mechanical problem solving. No interest or desire to be an engineer. Phenomenal with single variable problems in multi-dimensional space. Not good with multi-variable problems in multi-dimensional space. Put those together and you’ve got officer-track fliers.

Top of his class in the first round of basic training.

Wherever this kid is going next, he’ll be useful.

 

 

* * *

A moment later, as C8 ushers him in, Kylo knows why Jacen McGy isn’t afraid of him. He waits for C8 to leave, and then quietly says, eyes wide and on Kylo’s, “You don’t want me. I’m not one of them.”

And for almost a heartbeat, Kylo just _doesn’t._ He’s got no need for this kid and can’t remember why he called him here.

Then he blinks, and for another heartbeat he feels swamped with just _horrible_ because he realizes what Jacen is making sure he doesn’t want him for. He’s old enough to know the stories of the Jedi Killer, and this is, apparently, his best attempt at defending himself.

And for another moment he’s really impressed that, on his own, untrained, with no hand gestures, Jacen has this level of voice control. Someone would have to be quite strong in the Force or _extremely_ strong-willed to not bend to Jacen’s voice.

Jacen, meanwhile, is still staring at him, and starting to get afraid, because the Jedi Killer has _not_ repeated those words back to him.

 

Kylo says, “I think you’ve fundamentally misunderstood the nature of this invitation.” Kylo inclines his head, pulls a chair out with the Force. Jacen doesn’t look impressed, because he’s good at covering his reactions, but Kylo can feel his excitement. “Sit. Talk with me.”

Jacen does, tentatively. There’s some real fear prickling behind his calm face, but he’s also aware that Kylo’s done nothing threatening. He’s re-evaluating the situation, fast. “You’re the Jedi Killer.”

“I _was_. I’m not now. And you aren’t a Jedi, so we’re all fine and dandy, aren’t we?”

Jacen looks him up and down, and Kylo can feel him trying to worm his way into his mind. He doesn’t let him, but he does make sure that his intentions, to give this kid a better chance than he ever dreamed of having, are clear.

“What do you want?” Jacen finally asks, unable to pull it out of Kylo’s head.

“To give you an opportunity.”

Jacen looks around the ship. “You already have.”

“A better one. If you want to be a pilot and eventually an officer, you’ll leave this room, find your bunk, and go from here. If you want to learn how to,” Kylo levitates the table next to them, “then I’ve got a proposition for you.”

Jacen stares at the table, hovering at his elbow. “Can I do both?”

Kylo settles the table again. “The training for that will take several years, but after that, you are more than welcome back here.”

Jacen nods. “I’m interested.”

“Good,” Kylo begins to wave his fingers, subtly, he doesn’t want to give away what he’s doing, it’s just barely a twitch of two fingers on his lap, and gets “Mast—“ out before he stops.

Jacen’s just looking up at him. His face is impassive, but Kylo can feel his amusement as he says, “Something not right?”

“You’re blocking me.”

“Duh.”

Kylo eyes him. _That’s_ more impressive than his voice control. Kylo is not, by any stretch, a novice at this technique, and if this child can block him, he’s got _deep_ talent. “I don’t have to let you do that.”

“But you’re going to. You don’t _want_ to fight me.” Jacen’s eyes are wide, and his eye contact is spectacular, and if he just knew the last little bit of the spell…

Kylo snorts a laugh. “Wrong. I’m _not_ going to fight you. Want isn’t part of this picture. And I know what you just did.”

“Tried to do, you mean. I failed.”

“Force! You’re _still_ doing it.” Kylo stares at the child… subadult, in front of him. He _doesn’t_ think about how if Jacen McGy used his hands to go with what he’s doing with his voice, he’d have much more success. “How long have you been able to do this?”

“Do what?”

Kylo gives him a _cut the shit_ look. “Look, I _know_ what you’re doing. You use your voice to make people do things they wouldn’t do otherwise.” He sniggers. “Oh… That’s… You’ve got the highest eval numbers in your class. Let me guess, you didn’t have any trouble giving your trainer a selection of useful suggestions. And in a matter of days he thought you were the best thing he’d ever seen.”

Jacen smirks. “Hours.”

Kylo sighs. “Can you actually fly?”

Jacen looks mortally insulted at that. It’s one thing to make his trainers like him, it’s another to entirely fake a discipline that could get other people killed if you aren’t as good at it as you say. “I can fly.” Then he just watches Kylo.

Kylo can feel what he’s thinking. It’s right on the top of his head. “No. It won’t take you days to bend me. It took Snoke more than a two decades, and he had more raw power in his toenail than you do in your whole body, and started when I was a baby. So, _stop it_.”

Jacen blinks. Kylo put some Force into those words, just enough to make sure he knows that he’s not dealing with some easily manipulated pawn.

“Maybe this amuses me,” Jacen says, by way of explanation, and as a way to test what Kylo’s going to do.

“I’m sure it does. But it doesn’t amuse me, and I’m the one with the lightsaber.”

“Please, you won’t use that on me for being a smartass.”

 _There was a time…_ Though he’s fairly certain if he’d run into Jacen during his Jedi Killer days, he would have raised him to the Knights. Something about the ability to be a raging smartass in the face of peril has always appealed to Kylo. He also realizes that Jacen already read all of that off of him. He’s been using the voice control stuff as a way to distract Kylo so he could read if he was in any real danger or not. “You’re right. But if you quit trying to manipulate me with your voice, I might decide to take you somewhere you can learn to really use the Force and build one for yourself.”

 _That_ and the fact he can feel Kylo’s not lying has Jacen’s attention.

“Take me somewhere… I thought you would train me yourself…”

“Eventually I will, but not yet. There’s a place where you can learn the basics, first, and after that, I’ll train you.”

“There’s nowhere like that.”

Kylo smirks at him. Jacen’s _so_ certain about that. “You’ve scoured the entire galaxy, checked everywhere, talked to everyone?”

The epic know-it-all eye roll amuses Kylo. “Everyone knows the Jedi are dead.” And he just _looks_ at Kylo. “Or is that, what… Burnishing your reputation? You killed one or two and then claimed to get the whole lot of them? You don’t feel like a liar.”

Kylo’s eyes are cold, and for a second Jacen sees some real danger there. He nods at it, almost pleased to see it’s there. “You’re right, I’m not a liar. The Jedi are dead, many of them by my hand. But the Maji aren’t.”

It’s clear Jacen’s never heard the term, but… Why would he have? “What’s… a Maji?”

 _I am, among other things._ Kylo lets his mind flow into Jacen’s, lets him feel what someone who’s been properly trained in this game can do with it. “And if you want to learn how to do that, you’re going to come with me, and _not_ be a smartass.”

“That’s probably like asking me not to breathe.”

“Okay, _try_ not to be a smartass. And quit it with the voice trick. One of these days I’ll show you how to really use it, but until then, _stop it_. Half of the kids there don’t have any Force skills, and if you turn them into your beasts of burden, I’ll drop you on a moon in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’ll get whoever pilots the ship to put me somewhere useful.”

Kylo flashes him a bright smile, grabs his hand, and teleports him to Rey’s cottage. “Are you sure about that?”

Jacen blinks, looking around the tidy main room of their home on Lirium. “Where are we?”

“ _Not_ on the _Supremacy_. Now, here’s the deal. You behave, keep your mouth shut about who brought you here, settle in, and _learn,_ and you get to stay here.”

“And if I don’t?”

“How many moons do you think I’ve been to?” Kylo says, voice perfectly even, as he floods Jacen’s mind with a collection of barren, rocky places barely capable of supporting single-celled organisms, let alone a human.

Jacen takes a moment to really ponder that question. “Why keep my mouth shut about how I got here?”

“Because Kylo Ren’s not the most popular man in the universe. Master Padme brought you here, got it?”

Jacen half inclines his head, looking around Rey’s living room, seeing the tool bench and the casing of a lightsaber she’s working on.

“Do I still get to be a citizen when I’m done here?”

Kylo feels it, the desire to belong to something, to have status, to _matter._ And he knows he can use that. “Learn what Rey’s got to teach you, what I’ve got to teach you, and you’ll be a citizen when you’re done. Then join me and learn to command. I’ll have a place for you as an officer in the Order, command a flight squadron, get good enough at it, maybe your own fleet, and maybe a senator after that.”

“Got plans for my voice?” And Kylo suddenly knows why Jacen’s former master valued him. And wonders who, or what, he had to be to be able to keep someone like Jacen as a slave.

“No. If I wanted to do that, I have my own voice. Eventually, though, you’ll have your own plans. So…” 

“Lead me to your Rey, Master Padme.”

“I will. Stay put, don’t touch anything, this is my home, not yours, and let me get changed.”

* * *

 

 

 

“A costume?” Jacen says when Kylo steps out of his room.

Kylo gives him a bit of the side eye. He appears to have obeyed orders, at least in the sense of ‘not touching anything.’ He is however, sprawled out over the chair, looking like he’s made himself at home. He is watching Kylo with a decent amount of curiosity on his face.

“Not anymore,” Kylo says. And these days, it’s not. He’s gotten to the point where he’s fairly comfortable in his Padme clothing. And he supposes that, should he ever feel like he doesn’t have to look like The Master of the Order when he’s with the Order, he might attempt to actually look like this. Though, given what Jon’s said about his colors, probably a black version of this.

“Uh huh. You’re in a different outfit and using a different name.”

“Maybe when I’m here I’m a different person.”

“People don’t work that way.”

Kylo rolls his eyes. “Sixteen.”

Jacen raises an eyebrow, insulted. “Mind reader. People don’t change.”

“Sure, kid. Come on.”

 

 

* * *

“Oh… she’s pretty,” Jacen says as they walk between the buildings in Rey’s town, getting closer to, but not right near, her chapel.

Kylo feels the jolt of… “I told you to stop doing that.” They’re way beyond too far for Jacen to see anything other than Rey having brown hair. All he was doing with that comment was trying to get Kylo to react.

“Just wanted to know the lay of the land. Your woman?”

“Don’t forget it.”

Jacen rolls his eyes. “Uh huh. I’m not stupid enough to get into a fight with an armed man who weighs twice as much as I do over a girl, especially one I’d have to _fight_.”

“Not every sixteen-year-old boy is that smart.”

“Well, I might do it over a boy, but…”

Kylo chuckles at that. “There’s a few of them here, too.”

That stops Jacen. “Really?” He sounds painfully excited by that idea. Kylo sighs, remembering what being sixteen was like.

“I don’t know if any of them’ll swing your way, and you damn well better not _make_ them if they aren’t already inclined in that direction, but there are boys here.”

“Oh.”

“You’re the oldest of the bunch of them, too. Probably. We don’t know how old all of them are, but… none of them are visibly older than you are.”

 

 

* * *

Rey looks up at them, thirty or forty meters off, feeling them come near. “You keep your distance?”

“I do when the suns are out. She’ll come to us.”

“They really don’t know who you are?”

“It’s better that way.”

“You want me to pretend not to know who you are?”

Kylo shakes his head. “I want you to not tell who I am. All of the adults know that Master Padme isn’t my real name. At least, they know that’s not the name I use when I’m with the Order _._ The children likely have an idea about that, too. They just don’t need to know what the real one is.”

“The adults don’t know who you are?”

“Some of them do. You’ll know who’s who by feel, won’t you?”

Jacen half inclines his head. Unless there’s an adult here who’s seriously better with the Force than he is, and he’s _doubtful_ of that, he’ll know. “Yes.”

“Good. Don’t fuck it up.”

Jacen pretends to be scandalized by Kylo’s word choice. “Did you just actually say that, _Master Padme_?”

“Did you just hear it?”

“Yes.”

“Then I must have said it.”

He’s looking up at Kylo, really looking at him this time, not trying to sort through his thoughts and motivations. “You’re not what I was expecting.”

“Nope.” Rey joins them, and Kylo takes her hands, kissing her, then he turns his attention to Jacen. “Rey, this is Jacen McGy.”

“Hello, Jacen.”

 

 

“He’s a stubborn little booger, with more power and information than is likely good for him, but I think we can do good things with him.”

“Is that always how you introduce new people?” Jacen asks, eyebrow arched, looking at Kylo like he’s being betrayed.

“It’s how I introduce little smartasses who think testing me is amusing.”

Rey watches this with a bit of a smile. “Hello, Jacen. Welcome to Lirium and the Maji.”

“Hello… Mistress Ren or is it Padme?”

“Just Rey.” She eyes him. “Knows more than you should… eh?”

Jacen rolls his eyes, a little. “Well, if people wouldn’t just walk around with all of their thoughts and feelings out all the time…”

 

 

* * *

“You like him,” Rey says that night, over dinner.

Kylo grins at that. “I do. I shouldn’t but… I really do.”

Rey smiles back at him, giving him a little shove with her shoulder. “You ever want a little brother?”

“No!” He had to fight hard enough to get time and attention from his parents, having to share it would have been unbearable. “And for a while it felt like I had half a dozen of them at Luke’s.”

“He’s going to be challenging.”

“Yes. But… Good challenge?” he asks, spooning up some of the rabbit stew he brought.

“I think so. He seems to be getting on with Critt.”

That stops him with his spoon midway to his mouth. One afternoon is awfully fast. “What sort of getting on?”

“Friendly. Why?” Rey can see there’s some alarm in his response, but doesn’t know why there should be.

“He likes boys, or at least told me that to see how I’d react to it.”

“How did you react?”

“I told him there were boys at the school and that if they didn’t already like boys he better not make them start liking them.”

“Fair enough. Still not sure why you’re asking.”

“You’re getting enough of them, old enough, that sex is going to start coming into play, so…”

“So…” she actually knows what he’s thinking, but she wants him to say it.

“So… is… are the Maji going to have… any opinions on ‘physically communing together in mutual accord and affection?’”

Rey sighs. “I suppose we should, but… I don’t feel like it’s any of my business with whom or how they _commune._ ”

“Ducking the question?” The idea that they may not have any sort of formal set of teachings on the subject strikes Kylo as… he’s not sure. It’s… not fitting. Religions have things like opinions on sex. Or they should. Maybe… Granted, right now it’s just _them_ not some sort of… He sighs at that… The Jedi of old were just like he and Rey, once. A few people feeling their way through a set of things, trying to come up with the best advice they can.

She’s following his thoughts, and gives him a little squeeze before saying, “Maybe I’d just prefer that they use the rest of the Maji teaching and apply that to their sex lives, as opposed to figuring out some extra set of rules to go with it.”

He inclines his head a bit. “That’s actually how it worked at Luke’s, all he had to say about communing was in accord with light principals, but… Sometimes you need the lesson repeated, a lot.”

“Sometimes the lesson doesn’t fit the students... My guess is if you weren’t trying to be passionless ascetics, you’d have had an easier time applying your philosophy to your actions.” She thinks for another moment, and then adds, “I wonder how much of it was working backwards. We don’t want to entirely cut ourselves off from sex, so, how do we shape the message so at least some of us can get some of it?”

Kylo snerks at that. “I have a feeling the Masters of old would be highly perturbed by your impertinence.”

Rey smiles. “Good.”

Kylo smiles a bit, and takes another bite of his supper, trying to imagine how sex and love and everything would have looked if his parents… his dad… who never tried to live as a passionless ascetic, had taught it. Less embarrassing and likely of more practical use. Beyond that, he just doesn’t know. Not like the two of them ever sat down and had a chat about girls.

On a more concrete level, he says, “Keeping it in kind with your teachings is one thing, not ending up with pregnant fifteen-year-olds is another. How’s your medbay stocked for preventatives?”

“I’ve never asked.”

“Probably worth it, and stocking it if it isn’t, and then having that chat with at least the older girls.”

“Not the boys?”

Kylo tries to imagine how that conversation would have gone with a female teacher. It was embarrassing enough with Luke, who was doing his best to be calm and balanced and judgement free, while staying within the bounds of light side theology. If it’d been with a woman, he’s fairly sure he would have spontaneously combusted from the embarrassment, and given exactly how volatile with the Force he was, it’s possible he could have literally done it. “There may be some jobs Finn or Poe could handle more readily than you can.”

She laughs at that. “Don’t think I’m a natural when it comes to the care and handling of shafts?”

He smirks and says, “I’m just saying that sometimes it’s better to talk to someone who’s had a lifelong history of hands-on appreciation.”

 

 

* * *

“Excuse me, sir, where’d McGy go?”

The training Lieutenant shrugs. “Special Training Ops, orders of the Master.”

“What’s Special Training Ops?” Carlie Sagan, McGy’s flight mate asks.

“None of us know. But every few cycles he picks a kid for it.”

“Where do they go?”

The Lt. shrugs at that, too. “Not here.”

“How do you get into it?”

The Lt. shrugs at that, too. “You just do. If he wants you, he grabs you.”

“What happens to them?”

One final shrug. “None of them have come back to tell us.”

There are a lot of theories about Special Training Ops, ranging from the fantastic, to the bloody, to the mundane, to the perverted. The members of the Order old enough to remember Snoke’s day tell tall tales of the Special Training Ops kids being murdered en masse. That Ren keeps an eye out for anyone who may one day challenge him, and weeds them out young.

The ones who saw what happened to the cruel trainer on the _Supremacy_ don’t believe those stories. Ren decapitated a trainer for going too hard on the kids, he’s not about to be murdering them for kicks.

But… no one knows, so the stories grow.

 

 


	40. Babies

9/27/1

 

Rey’s grinning at Finn. “No problem, at all. Paige and I can have an evening together. We’ll get on fine. Go, do something fun.”

“You sure?” Finn’s looking a little nervous about this as he asks. He’s hoping to surprise his wife with a nice evening _out_ to celebrate their wedding anniversary. But before he can put that plan into play, he’s got to find someone to take care of their daughter.

“I’m sure. How often do you get to have a first wedding anniversary? Go, enjoy!”

“You and Padme gonna play house?” Finn asks with a smirk.

Rey rolls her eyes at him. “I’m pretty sure it doesn’t count as playing when he lives there, too.”

Finn spends a moment looking at her, and then asks the question they’ve all been wondering about for months now. “Rey, how does he _get_ home?”

“The Force.”

“Yeah, we all _got_ that. No ship, but we see him around from time to time, so obviously he’s not flying here, but… _how?_ ”

Rey’s never tried to explain it, so… “Just… uh… watch.” And then she’s standing on the other side of the room.

“Did you just… teleport?” Finn’s staring at her, and where she used to be, and where she is now, astounded.

“I think so. I just… focus on where I need to be, and I’m there.”

“Can you go anywhere?”

“I think I need to know where I’m going. Be able to really see and feel it. I couldn’t just pop up somewhere based on you telling me about it, but I could probably get back to Takodana.” Though, she knows that’s not strictly true. She was able to bring herself to Kylo’s room, and office, even though she didn’t know it inside and out when they started this. He was there, and that was enough. She’s fairly sure she can bring herself to anywhere he may be.

“Moving things? Like could you get to Chewie on the _Falcon_?”

“Yes. I don’t think it’s a _where_ thing so much as a knowing thing. I don’t have to pinpoint exactly where the _Falcon_ is, I just have to know it.”

“So… the kids say you leave when you ‘meditate,’ you’re really gone when you do that?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

She gives him an arched eyebrow and an arch look. “Where do you think?”

“He’s got a high enough rank to have his own, private, chambers?” Finn’s shaking his head. “No one below First Lieutenant has their own quarters.” Finn thinks a moment longer, about what he and Rose do when they’re alone, and what Padme and Rey likely do. “Private and secure… He can say, ‘No disruptions,’ and then not be disrupted. He’s got his own ship, doesn’t he?”

She nods, and glances around to the several marks of the Order in her cottage. There are a few thick, warm black blankets draped over her chair, some black plates and cups, the jar of coffee beans and coffee press, a few condiments, several tools on her workbench, just… Little things people bring back and forth when they eat or move from one room of their home to other. “When it mattered, he was better at keeping his mind shut than Snoke was at reading it.”

Finn shakes his head. “Poe’s got to know who he is. There’s… No shot that he was part of the Resistance and Poe doesn’t at least know his face.”

Rey just looks at him. “Like I said, Leia and Chewie know him. I don’t know if Poe did, he’d… been with the First Order for a long time.”

“Leia got him in there when she started Resisting?”

She shrugs. “Leia and I never exactly talked about how he ended up there.”

 

 

* * *

Eventually, even on a place as out of the way and secluded as Lirium, parents leave their babies.

And, like probably every other parent who’s besotted with their child, but still wants some time to do something like eat an entire meal and maybe have a full conversation without it getting derailed by said small person, Finn and Rose want some time _away._

Granted, getting _away_ is still a bit trickier than expected.

Finn’s more or less ready to sprint away, but Rose is lingering, as they’re handing Paige off to Rey.

“Bottles, extra bottles, nappies, more nappies, wipes, extra clothing, cradle…” Rose says, touching each of the things she’s brought over to Rey’s. From the looks of it, she’s making sure that Rey’s ready for a few _months_ with Paige, not a few hours, but… It’s normal.

Rey’s gently bouncing Paige, who’s looking at her, and the cottage, and just generally getting the lay of the land. “Rose, your cottage is less than four hundred meters from here. I can rummage around if I don’t have whatever it is here.”

“You’re really sure you’re good with this?” Rose asks, about to take Paige back from Rey.

“Go! You’re leaving for four hours, not four weeks. Paige and I will be _fine_.”

Finn grabs his wife’s hand, kisses his baby girl, mouths _thank you_ to Rey, and pulls her out of Rey’s cottage.

Rey looks down at Paige, who’s bright eyed and awake right now. “So… What do you want to do?”

She looks at Rey, and starts to fuss.

Rey begins to rock her, making little “shhhh” sounds. It takes a moment, but she gets the feel of intensely sucking on something. Rey holds Paige so she can look into her tiny, dark eyes, and says, “I know you’re not hungry, I can feel that.”

She can also still feel the desire to suck.

Rey goes to her sink, washes her hands, and then lets Paige have the tip of her finger. She starts slorping away on it, fussing stopping fast.

 

 

And that’s what Kylo comes home to, Rey in her chair, reading a renegade gray Jedi’s theories on dualism, Paige in her arms, sleepily sucking away on her finger, settling into naptime, as Rey hums at her.

And, if Kylo could have gotten her pregnant just by _wanting_ it, baby Ren would have been in the works. But even with the Force, it doesn’t quite work that way.

 

 

* * *

Sleeping babies are fun and pleasant to be around. Other than Kylo and Rey both being a bit nervous about making any noise, dinner is awfully easy. Paige snoozes in her crib, they share food, and talk in their heads, and it’s a _quiet_ evening.

  

* * *

Awake babies, especially newly awake, hungry, wet, and somewhat crabby because food has not instantaneously appeared the exact millisecond said baby wants it, are significantly _less_ pleasant to be around.

On the upside, as two Maji, they have a significantly easier time than an average first time babysitter figuring out what Paige wants. (Food.)

On the downside, neither of them has ever changed a diaper before.

“And why I had nannies is suddenly abundantly clear,” Kylo says as he’s washing his hands, and wishing he’d never seen or handled _that._

“Don’t think Leia enjoyed baby poop?” Rey says, fetching the bottle for Paige, who, thoroughly cleaned up, is much more pleasant to cuddle, or will be, if she stops yelling, which Rey hopes will happen when she gets some food into her.

“If I had to guess.”

“Here…” Rey scoops Paige up from the changing mat, and cuddles her in close. “Look, food.”

Paige isn’t entirely sure about bottles, but she is sure about eating, and she gloms on, fast.

“Good girl. Look at you eat!”

More enthusiastic slorping.

“Do you think I can…” He _really_ wants to hold Paige, and they’re both very aware of the fact that that’s nothing he’d ever be granted permission to do.

Rey stands up, and nods to the chair. Kylo sits. “Don’t tell on Uncle Kylo, okay?” she says to Paige as she bounces her a little.

“Like I’ll ever be Uncle Kylo,” he replies, holding his arms out for Paige.

“Well, that’s normally what a little girl would call her aunt’s husband, so…” She hands Paige over, who takes a moment to get settled in Kylo’s arms, not entirely sure if she likes this new body and smell near her, but… Okay, the big black blur has the bottle and suddenly she’s really pleased to be in his arms.

Kylo’s staring down at her, watching her sucking on the bottle, seeing her eyes looking up very intently at his.

Rey smirks a little. “When I was with Luke, the caretakers asked who I was. He told them I was his niece.”

Kylo glances up at her, away from Paige. “Really?”

“Really.” She strokes the back of his neck. “After all, that’s what you’d call your nephew’s wife, right?”

“Only if he’d gotten so senile he lost a few years.”

Rey snerks a little at that.

“She doesn’t like the bottle,” Kylo says, sensing the way Paige is feeling it in her mouth. The texture and shape are wrong, and it’s not warm, and doesn’t smell like Rose.

“But she’ll put up with it because she’s hungry,” Rey adds. She sits on the arm of the chair, her arm around Kylo’s shoulders. “See, she likes you.”

“Because I’m feeding her.”

“She’s almost four months old, if you’re warm and bring her food, you’re awesome.”

They sit there, quietly, as Paige sucks up her dinner.

“You know, if it’s their anniversary, it’s ours, too,” he says, looking up at her, a bit of spark in his eyes.

Rey shifts his hair, and kisses the back of his neck, huge grin on her face, and some very warm thoughts in her head. “Yeah. I know.”

“How long were they going to stay out?” That spark’s getting warmer as plans for the rest of the evening coalesce around the feel of her teeth against the nape of his neck and the images in her mind.

Rey shifts up to look him in the eyes. “About four hours.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“About another hour.” She grins down at him.  

 

 

* * *

“She’s getting sleepy,” Rey says half an hour later, after Paige has finished dinner and is resting on Kylo’s chest. He’s humming tunelessly at her, patting her back, and she’s opening and closing her fist in his tunic.

“I know.” He can feel tiredness clinging to her eyes, and how she’s a few moments from just slipping off to sleep on his chest.

Rey glances from him to the crib.

He shakes his head, his hand gently stroking up and down Paige’s back. “She doesn’t want to go there.”

Rey inclines her head a bit. It’s perfectly clear to both of them that Paige is awfully happy where she is and would prefer to stay on the warm, solid, gently vibrating person under her. “I know. If it was up to her, she’d spend pretty much all of her time on a warm human.” She glances at the crib again. “Finn and Rose like to, at least occasionally, not have a baby on them, though.”

 

 

He nuzzles the top of Paige’s head, and then looks up at Rey with a smirk on his face. “What sort of dark menace would I be if I don’t break the rules to suit my own desires?”

She rolls her eyes a little, but doesn’t move to take Paige away and put her in her crib.

Kylo makes a pleased little hum to Paige, and nuzzles her again. “After all, I’m not the one who’s going to have to try and get you to sleep on your own later tonight.”

Rey gives him a little shove.

He smirks at her, his hand gently rubbing up and down on Paige’s back as her eyes drift shut. “Small indulgences and rule-breaking is the _point_ of uncles.”

She has a flash of several whispered conversations between Kylo and Lando, most of them along the lines of “Your mom and dad don’t have to know about this.”

“Did they?”

“Probably. But it made me happy to believe we had secrets.”

 

 

* * *

Rey feels Finn and Rose coming before they get to her door.

And she feels Kylo sigh, a mixture of annoyed, resigned, angry, and sad, all of them muted down, pastel versions of bright colored emotions, as he hands Paige over to her, and heads to their bedroom, to hide.

She’s mostly feeling… she doesn’t know… torn about that. Making him hide feels… awful, especially in his own home, and part of her really wants to just be done with this… just, be out in the open with him and let it fall how it falls, but… she’s so scared of everything going sideways if they’re out in the open and…

Moot point, for now. There’s knocking at the door, and she opens it, attention on Rose and Finn who are looking like they had a good time out and about, and she gets hit with this _wave_ of abject pleasure at seeing Paige again. It’s this huge, sharp, _joy_ sparking at the sight of their daughter and…

And she sort of knew that she might have trouble with Finn and Rose leaving. She could expect that might be an issue for her, but it wasn’t. It was utterly clear that they weren’t rejecting Paige or throwing her away or doing anything other than trying to get a little time with each other. So, they left, and it didn’t set any of her past off.

And now they’re back, and Rose is holding Paige, cooing at her, and Finn’s got his hand over Rose’s on Paige’s back, asking how his baby girl is and if she had a good time with Aunt Rey, and…

And it bursts over Rey, in a long, shuddering almost wail of abject anguish. She swallows it down, _hard,_  determined to not break down sobbing in front of Finn and Rose because they came back, and her parents didn’t.

 

 

* * *

On the other side of the bedroom door, Kylo is having something of an existential crisis. He absolutely _knows_ Rey doesn’t want him out there with Finn and Rose. And he can feel her all but screaming beneath her skin, and all he wants to do is pull her close and cuddle her.

And, either she’s doing an astonishingly good job of hiding her pain, or Finn and Rose are so besotted with the baby girl in their grasp that they just _can’t_ feel Rey dying next to them, or they just don’t care, or…

_Fuck it!_

 

 

He steps out, fast, pulling Rey near, noticing for a tenth of a second both of the Ticos staring at him in utter horror, Finn scrambling for the blaster he’s not wearing, and Rose going pale, cuddling Paige to her, turning her back, putting her physical body between the monster and her baby.

He casts, quickly, fingers moving, anger, fear, the desire to comfort his woman all lending extra power to his Force. “Not him,” his fingers move across his body, and Finn and Rose go soft and easy, comforted by _Padme’s_ presence. “Leave.” And they do, without another word.

They’re not even a step through the door, when he’s pulling Rey to him, holding her close, his face against the top of her head, his arms around her, a soft, dull sound coming from him, trying to comfort her.

He feels her heart wailing. Feels eons of waiting for someone to come back to her. Feels the empty lies she told herself, the days she marked onto a metal wall, every near-starvation meal, every aching muscle torn from too hard work, all in the service of keeping the truth that no one was coming back at bay. Feels that moment when she finally broke, finally gave up on anyone ever coming back for her. He sees her standing in front of him, tears streaming down her face, as he broke her lies open and made her face them. The lie of her parents were somewhere just out of reach, searching for her, too.

“Shhhh…”

He remembers her making that noise to him when he mourned Leia. Not to quiet him, but just to provide a soothing vibration. He can feel her holding him as he cried himself out for the loss of his mother and everything that went with it.

He strokes her back, and picks her up, settling both of them on the floor, in front of the armchair, holding her steady, feeling her shudder and sob against him.

 

Dark side. He’s always worn his pain on his face and his skin. Cloaked himself in it. Drew strength off of it. Hurt himself when he needed more, needed to endure another moment, fight a little stronger or harder. He can remember pounding the wound Chewie gave him when his adrenaline was flagging, the spike of pain keeping him going beyond what he should have been able to do. No one has ever had to wonder if he was in hurting. It’d cling to him like his scent, fill any room he was in. Always there, always with him. For decades, his nightly meditation was a litany of pain. Of every slight, insult, hurt, intentional or not. He filled his mind with it and thrived on it.

It may not have been healthy, or good for him, or… constructive. But no one, ever, had a chance of pretending Kylo Ren wasn’t in pain.

But light side Rey, with her easy smile and helpful demeanor, and pretty looks… Even he could forget it was under there. And maybe sometimes she did, too. Maybe that’s important. Maybe it makes everything else in life easier to bear if there’s not a constant thrum of pain in the background.

He holds her close, feeling her heart pounding and all of the pain of all of those years of begging them to come back. But it was always there, always hiding back there.

He rocks her, gently, lips pressed to the top of her head, as she wails. The cry of a small child being ripped away from her parents. Parents who didn’t deserve her.

There’s a knocking at her door, “Rey… What’s wrong, Rey?” And then it slips open and Jacen’s there.

His eyes flash wide, at Rey sobbing in Kylo’s arms. Kylo just shakes his head. “Nothing anyone here did, and nothing anyone can help.”

“They’ll be here in a minute if she keeps crying like this. Everyone can feel it, and no one wants Rey hurting.”

Kylo nods. “Send them away. She’ll talk when and as she wishes, later.”

Jacen nods.

Kylo pulls the back to the _Supremacy,_ to his bed, where she can be as loud and sad and hurt as long as she needs without having to answer any questions about it.

He can feel the sounds in her mind. “I’ll be back, sweetheart.” He doesn’t know if they actually said it, or if it’s a lie she told herself so many times she can’t find the line between truth and a hope. He doesn’t think it matters if it happened or not, not in the sense of making things better or different or…

He strokes her hair, and takes her left hand in his right. His thumb glides over her ring. _I will always, no matter what, dead or alive, come back to you. Always._

He feels her understand his vow, and nod a little, but right now he knows that’s a vow for him. A promise to himself, for himself, for how he’ll treat her. There’ll be a time when she’s less mired in her own sorrow, a time when this vow can be for her, but now isn’t it.

 _I love you._ That’s for her, but with the knowledge that one love doesn’t erase the pain of the lack of others. If anyone knows that, he does.

 _You are enough._ That’s for her, too. And again, it’s thought with the awareness of the fact that for her parents, she wasn’t. They valued a cheap drunk more than they valued her, and that was that. And nothing he or anyone else can ever do can even come close to making that better. It’s just something she’s got to endure.

He holds her close, rocking her gently, and makes one more promise, to the future, to their children not yet conceived. There aren’t words to go with it, just feelings, love and acceptance, hope and patience, a determination to cherish her light, and to use his dark to shield and protect them, and wrapping her in them, in the world he _will_ give their children, that slows her crying, some.

He can’t erase her past any more than she can erase his, but they can be better to the future than the past was to them.

And that’s something.

 

 

* * *

This is a dream. He knows they’re in his bed, clinging closely to each other. And like his dream of Anakin, one of his ghosts has come to visit. Unlike his dream with Anakin, he knows from the first breath that this is real.

“Are you here as a warning or…”

Han’s very _Han_ right now, at ease, all but oozing confident charm. He crooks a half smile and says, “Thought you might want to chat with your dad a bit. Maybe… advice?”

They’re in the Falcon, not as it is, but as he remembers it, dingy off-white paneling and Han’s half-in, half-out one of the maintenance hatches, about to dip down and work on something.

Han lowers himself down, into the inner-workings of the _Falcon_. Most of their best moments with each other were spent like this, Han deep in the electronics, messing around, Ben handing him tools.

Kylo strides over to the hatch, but it’s only two steps away now, and sits next to it, easily folding his legs under him. “Not sure I’m looking for advice.”

“Not sure you’d take it if it were on offer?” Han says, not looking up.

Kylo shrugs, leaning over so he can see down to where Han is. “I’d listen to it. I’m getting better at that. Don’t necessarily take it, but I do listen to it more often now.”

Han nods. “Gamma spanner?”

Kylo hands it down, and waits. Han doesn’t actually tighten anything with that tool. That one’s entirely for whacking things that are out of place back into place. After a few sharp bangs, Han tucks it into his belt. He may need to whack something else, soon.  

“So…” Kylo leads.

“Wait,” Han says, looking up at Kylo from his spot under the floor. “You want it so bad you can taste it. I can feel it. Fantasies of her and your baby and all of it. But, _wait._ Give it time. She’s not going anywhere. You two actually get on, more than just…” Han doesn’t fill in that sentence, but Kylo can feel what he’s not saying about his relationship with Leia. “Anyway. _Wait._ ”

Kylo just looks at him. “That’s it, wait?”

Han nods. “Wait. How much of everything you hated about growing up can be blamed on your mom and I being in the middle of one war or uprising or civil disturbance or another?”

Kylo thinks about that and decides that maybe not all or even most of it, but _enough_ was, and it made everything else more difficult, too. He nods.

 

 

Han climbs up, so he’s once again half-in, half-out. “Get as secure as you can. I know you don’t want to be the father I was, always gone, kid tucked away, hidden from the new threat each week brought up. And I know if you wait to be completely secure, it’ll never happen, so, I’m not saying wait until you’ve got everything under control, but… wait long enough you feel like you at least control your home territory. If that’s the _Supremacy_ or wherever you end up, make sure you’ve got that safe, that you’ve got a second-in-command or better a few of them you trust. So that you’re not feeling like every minute you aren’t personally overseeing everything that you’re in danger.”

“Is that you or Mom talking?”

Han rolls his eyes a little at that. “Just because I did a better job of keeping the worry off my face and out of my voice doesn’t mean I didn’t feel it. And we learned about controlling our home the hard way. They bugged your first nanny droid.”

“Is that why—“ All the nannies he remembers were human.

Han nods. “Yeah. You can’t really bug a person. And if any of them were telling our secrets, your mom would have felt it. But we had to learn that the hard way. That’s why we moved out of Hanna City, too. If someone was coming, we’d make them have to hump it way the hell out into the boonies to do it.”

“Did they come?”

Han doesn’t exactly shrug, but he’s not exactly bubbling over with the truth right now.

“I’m not ten anymore.”

“A few times… a year. We had perimeter guards. They took care of it. Nothing got within a klick of our home, but that’s a lot closer than your mom and I wanted them. Especially since it tended to happen when we weren’t around.”

Kylo can certainly understand that. And with that something else slips into place. “That’s part of how she convinced you to take me to Luke.”

He half shrugs. “It certainly didn’t weaken her argument. By the time you were eight, everyone knew where we were. The number of people who knew where Luke’s Jedi school was could be counted without taking off your trousers, so… Yeah. It helped.”

Kylo raises an eyebrow at that. “Did you run into a lot of people who couldn’t count to twenty-one without help?”

Han smirks brilliantly at that. “More than you’d think. The galaxy’s full of idiots.”

Kylo inclines his head; he’s sure that’s not wrong, too. “If waiting’s such a good plan, why didn’t you and Mom?”

Han snorts a quick laugh, and says, “Speaking of being unable to count…” Then he just _looks_ at Kylo.

Kylo’s mouth opens and then closes and then, for the first time ever, he realizes the fact that his birthday is pretty much exactly ten Imperial Standard months after the Battle of Endor. “Oh.”

Han nods, and smiles. “The party after the Battle of Endor is one of my best memories. Sometimes, you’re just so happy… everything else fades away.”

“I’d guess so.”

He stares at his son. “Are you going to tell me you’ve never been there?”

Kylo feels the half-smile spread across his lips, remembering what day this is the anniversary of, and even if they didn’t get any level of celebration he was hoping for, there’ll always be tomorrow, or next month, or year. “No. That’s… uh… one of my best memories, too.”

“Uh huh.” That gets another Han smirk. A genuinely amused one this time. They’re quiet for a moment, holding a companionable silence. Probably the first once since Kylo was eight.

Kylo breaks it. “Why didn’t you… talk to me like this when I was younger?”

“I tried. I’d call, remember, and you’d duck out, tell me you were busy, or not answer, or we’d start fighting.”

Kylo swallows. “I always felt like… you didn’t want to be talking to me. Like you called out of… duty, or so you could tell Mom you tried. And I didn’t want to… be a chore you did so Mom wouldn’t yell at you.”

Han exhales long and slow at that. “Nervous. I was nervous.” He rolls his eyes a little, and half-shrugs and rubs his lips together. “You were young, and a Jedi…” another eye roll, “and I was supposed to be _encouraging_ that, and most of my stories weren’t exactly… _appropriate_.” He rubs his hand over his lips. “’Hey, Ben, did I ever tell you about that great party after Endor? Your mom and I got really drunk on victory, one cup of wine, and each other and… ten months later there you were!’ That’s not a story for your fourteen-year-old, even if he wasn’t training to be a monk. How about… ‘What’d you do this week, Dad?’ ‘Got into a twenty ship dogfight while carrying ‘medical supplies’ that were really intelligence on some general or another who hadn’t taken the Concordance as personally binding to him, almost died three times, killed a few dozen people, saw your mom for a night, and then off to the next fight. Lando and Chewie and I spent two days creeping through a maze of cantinas and casinos picking up intel. Got into three more fights, including two shootouts, and then hot-tailed it out of there in the _Falcon_.’ I had… nothing… appropriate to talk to you about, and _no one_ thought the sort of stories I could easily tell, would make it easier for you to stick with your training. And then, on top of that, even if I was just _thinking_ about them, you could pick them up, and then Leia and Luke would be annoyed at me for _sabotaging_ _our best hope_ and…”

“Well… that’s not wrong. I wanted that!”

“I knew.” Han’s quiet. “And… seeing you over the holovid… When you were having a good day it was fine, and… On the good days, you were _so much_ better. But the bad ones… seeing how miserable you were… how angry… That made it hard to leave you there.”

“Good!” there’s a sharp pleasure in Kylo’s voice. If he had to suffer, everyone else should, too.

Han just looks at him, eyes cool, and then voice dry, he says, “Yeah. It’s easy to say that, here, now, looking back. Give it time, kid.” And then his voice is _not_ dry. “You are going to do things your kid _hates_. And all you’ve got is the hope that it’ll work out. And hope’s _not_ a fucking promise. You’ll beg the Force and any and every god you’ve ever heard the name of that it works out, but you won’t know until it’s done, and even then… _You won’t know_.” Han looks up at Kylo, keeping deep, serious eye contact. “You’ll do everything you can, bleed for it, _die_ for it, if you need to, for the _hope_ that it’ll help, but you’ll never _know._ ”

Kylo swallows, hard, at that.

And Han nods, slowly.  

It’s a dream, not a ghost vision, so Kylo reaches out. Han’s still below him, head about knee level with Kylo, and he gently strokes his father’s face, fingertips making contact with skin rough with stubble. His voice is harsh, broken, as he says, “Thank you.”

 

 

Han nods, and squeezes Kylo’s hand.

The dream fades, and Kylo slips back into normal sleep, but he doesn’t forget it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to Strangecurrencies and Aviva Storm. Their donations to the 'Keep Keryl In 3D Rendering Software Fund' (https://ko-fi.com/S6S4EDLG) means I've got a new toy. FaceGen lets you put pictures of people into it, and spits out 3d models. Which means instead of taking a week of making a shape that looks kind of like Adam Driver or Daisy Ridley, and then rendering it and tweaking it and rendering it and tweaking it and rendering it and tweaking it and on and on and on until I can't see straight anymore. (There's a reason why I've got the two of them and OCs previous to this, but none of the 'real' characters. Getting them into even the neighborhood of right used to take forever.) But now, I spend an hour or so hunting for good reference photos, pop them in, and BOOM! 3D characters.
> 
> Thank you both, I love you, and I love the new art I can make!
> 
> Good stuff coming up, and if you loved today, Wednesday's gonna be just as much fun!


	41. Who Is Padme?

It’s morning before enough of Kylo’s spell burns off that Finn and Rose figure out that something really off happened the night before.

Like, _really_ off.

Like, they left Paige’s crib, extra wipes, nappies, and clothing at Rey’s. In fact, it looks like the only thing they brought home was Paige, which made for a somewhat off night, because she slept in the bed with them.

They’re both kind of… fuzzy… on what could have possibly happened where _that_ seemed like a good plan for the end of the night.

They were there. They were saying hello to Paige. They were petting her. And then Padme was in the room, holding Rey, who was… red… Like… flushed, and maybe… something was wrong… and then they were across the settlement in their own place with Paige and…

Weird.

Like, bugfuck insane _weird._

“We saw Padme, right?” Finn says, as he’s getting their breakfast stuff together and Rose feeds Paige. Padme who never lets any of them really see him just… stepped into the room. He remembers that.

“Yeah. He was in the room. He stepped in and…” Rose’s voice trails off because she can kind of remember like… almost… a spike of fear or something, but… Not why or how or… Even how they got home.

“Yeah.” Finn has the same muddled expression on his face. “Black?”

“Lots of black. I remember black. Dark hair, and black clothing, and…” The man has to have a face. It’s almost literally impossible for him to not have a face, but Rose has no idea what it looks like.

“Big. He’s _big._ Sort of filled up the whole room.”

Rose nods at that, too. “Or… maybe not… him… but like… his Force?”

Finn’s on the verge of giving himself whiplash he’s nodding so hard at that. “Yeah. There was this… power around him.”

“Did it scare you?” Rose asks.

Finn’s thinking hard. Trying to remember. She was holding Paige. He had an arm around her, and his hand on Paige’s back, and he was looking at her face, grinning at her, and she was looking up at them, and there was the sound of the door opening, and then he looked up, and everything went cold for a half-second, and he can remember the feel of the hand around Rose reaching for his belt, where his blaster would be, but wasn’t because he doesn’t wear a gun on a date, and he was leaping forward, trying to get his girls behind him, and…

They were home.

“I think it must have. I can’t remember feeling fear, but… my body was doing fear things.”

Rose nods again. She strokes Paige’s face. “What happened last night, baby girl?”

Finn puts a plate next to Rose; it’s got toast and sausages and eggs on it. Nursing mamas need to eat, and he loves the fact that he can keep her in lots of healthy, nutritious food. He loves the fact that four months on, her cheeks and hips and breasts are still plump and round. For anyone raised on a core world, it’s a silly, little thing, but neither of them were, and it’s nothing they take for granted.

“How about I go over, get the rest of our stuff, and ask?” Finn asks, stroking Paige’s face.

“That sounds like a good plan.”

 

 

* * *

Or it would be, if anyone was home. It’s not the first time he’s knocked on Rey’s door and no one answered. It is the first time there’s a pile of his stuff in there, some of which he could really use, so… He pokes his head in. “Rey?”

 

Nothing.

“Okay, yeah, you’re really not here. That’s uh… great. All right. I’m just… getting all the fucking stuff I just left here for no good reason last night.” _Kriffing Force users._

He gathers up Paige’s stuff, puts it into the cradle, and… yeah, there’s just this _off_ feeling, and…

“She’s with Padme,” Jacen says, voice soft, though Finn just about jumps out of his skin when he hears him.

“Jacen! _Don’t_ sneak up on people like that!”

“I wasn’t trying to. The door was open, and I could feel you being curious.”

“Yeah, well, we picked up Paige last night and then… nothing.”

Now Jacen looks curious. “Nothing? You didn’t hear her crying?”

“Crying?” Finn’s appalled that he could have missed that. Rey was _crying?_ Rey _never_ cries. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I was getting ready for bed, talking with Magiit and Elias, and then there was this horrible wave of sorrow, so I come over here to check it out, and she’s crying, and Padme’s petting her back, and then he took her away. _What happened?_ ”

“I have no idea.” And Finn’s not sure what bugs him more, that he has literally _no_ idea, or that he can tell that Jacen’s figured out Finn’s the last person to see Rey before whatever happened happened, and he’s using his voice to compel Finn to tell what happened.

And Jacen’s staring at him, rapidly coming to the conclusion that Finn really has _no_ idea, but he _should,_ and that when someone who knows how to build this spell does it, they do it _right._

“Wait, you just walked in and saw Padme?” Finn says.

“Well, uh, yeah. He brought me here. I’ve seen him a few times. You haven’t?”

“Just… Last night… For a minute.”

Finn watches Jacen nod slowly, and then say, “He said it was nothing anyone here had done, and nothing anyone could do about it.”

“Oh.” And like that, Finn knows that whatever the problem is, Padme is handling it.

Because, that’s what a husband does.

 

 

* * *

Kylo supposes knocking can sound tentative. He’s not sure if C8 can do tentative, but it sounds that way. “Master Ren…”

 

“Later, C8.” He keeps his voice low, not that that matters much. He needs to get the soundproofing in his room taken care of, but it keeps slipping his mind.

“You have—“

“They’ll wait.” Rey stirs a little in his arms, and he snuggles her close. He’s going exactly nowhere until she gives him leave to. And that’s that. He strokes her hair, pulling as much soft, content, sleepy Force as he can, hoping to wrap her in a warm, soothing blanket of his touch and magic.

It’s a good three hours past when he’d normally be up and moving. Their breakfast and coffee are cold, and still on the outside of the door, his morning reading and readying time has evaporated, and his first meeting is looming, and none of it matters a fucking lick.

Kinear and Schiff can handle whatever needs handled for right now.

She cried through most of the night, and dropped into an exhausted sleep a few hours ago.

She held him through his tears, and he can damn well repay the favor.

Plus, she wasn’t sleeping for most of the night, so he wasn’t either, and then when he was sleeping, he was dreaming intensely, so he’s tired. And it’s just… good… to be able to rest when you’re tired.

“C8.”

“Sir?”

“Bring the food in. We’ll eat sooner or later.” After all, C8 knows there’s someone in here with him. Everyone else does, too, apparently. And it’s not like he can shock the droid by being, still, they hadn’t undressed, in his blacks minus his tunic, belt, and gloves, cuddling his woman in his bed. So, they might as well have some food ready when they finally get up.

C8’s in with the tray a moment later, putting it on Kylo’s table. He glances to see Kylo in bed, wrapped around Rey, but doesn’t say anything. He just nods, and quietly says, “I’ll clear today’s schedule.”

“Tomorrow, too.”

“Done, sir.”

 

* * *

There’s a minute where Finn’s feeling pretty good about everything. He’d been on a mission, find out what happened, and he still doesn’t know, but he’s completely unbothered by that because Padme’s on the job, and…

He’s a few feet from his house when it washes over him that not only does he not know what happened, he _still_ doesn’t have his stuff, and he’s going to personally smack some sense into Jacen, assuming he can catch the little bugger and keep his mind about him, because he knows what Jacen just did.

He turns around, muttering to himself about fucking Majis and their fucking magic and their fucking covering for each other. He goes back to Rey’s, gets Paige’s stuff, looks around, hoping that… something will click, but it doesn’t.

They were there, and then they weren’t, and…

And Poe’s due in today, and he’s thinking that when he gets in they are sitting down and having a real chat about Padme, because what the hell is wrong with this guy that he’ll mind wipe them rather than let him see them for a minute and a half?

He lets the kids see him. And sure, they’re not going anywhere anytime soon, but…

Something about this guy is just off, and if he’s making Rey cry…

If he’s making Rey cry, he’s gonna do some crying, too, and Finn, and Poe, and Chewie are going to personally make sure for every tear she sheds, he sheds at least ten.

 

 

* * *

Rey has the sense of voices near her, and a moment of maybe thinking that there shouldn’t be voices, but… Worrying about it is too big of a pain in the ass. She’s exhausted, and warm, and… sore.

She can’t think of why she should be sore, but she just _hurts_ all over.

So she snuggles in closer to Kylo, feeling his chin against the top of her head and his arms around her, and burrows back into sleep. Everything else can wait.

Except it can’t… She’s warm, and tired, but her brain is waking up, refusing to just drift along and…

Sore.

She just _hurts._ Like… the last time she felt like this she’d just crashed into the floor after Snoke finished flooding her with pain. She feels like an all over bruise.

She feels the scrape of Kylo’s stubbled chin against her forehead, his lips soft against her. “Hey,” his voice is quiet.

She blinks, realizes they’re on the _Supremacy_ where they haven’t been spending much time since he found out about the lack of soundproofing on his room. She blinks again, not remembering coming here.

Just… all over pain. Her body, soul, heart, everything screaming at once, bellowing out in agony.

At something so basic as _good_ parenting.

She feels herself flush in embarrassment. And again, lips against her forehead. “None of that. I have it on good authority that part of being a Maji is actually feeling whatever it is that’s going on, and trying to understand it, not just shoving it into the back of your mind and pretending it’s not there.”

She’d glare at him, but her face is against his neck, so it’s not like he’d see it.

“Feels stupid,” she says.

He gently rubs her back. “I’ve got decades of practice feeling stupid about my emotions. I’ve never found a single situation where it helped.”

She knows he’s right, but, she still feels sore, and stupid, and just… bad. “What time is it?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“You’ve got meetings, and I’ve got—“

He shakes his head. “Today, it doesn’t matter. The Order won’t implode if Kinear takes my meetings, and the Maji won’t self-destruct if they have to spend an unplanned day without you.”

“They’ll wonder where I am.”

“Jacen knows you’re with me.” He scoots down a little, so they’re face to face, and he gently strokes her cheek. He offers her a somewhat flat half smile. “The first time I touched your mind, I saw your memory of them. Of being pulled away, screaming. ‘I’ll come back, Sweetheart.’ It’s in there, clamoring around…” he lets it hang, hoping she’ll talk to him about it. But she doesn’t say anything, so he finishes the sentence, “but I only hear it in your voice.”

 

 

She blinks again, feeling the soreness intensify.

He nods at that. “I know it hurts.” Another of those limp half-smiles. “That’s part of why I can handle pain so well. It _always_ hurt.” He kisses her. “You never let yourself feel it, did you? Never mourned it because you never let yourself really admit it happened?”

She nods at that. And he kisses her again, and then shifts up, letting her burrow her face against his chest. “So… no, nothing on the schedule for today. Maybe nothing tomorrow, if we need it. Just you and I and feeling it. You can’t kill the past if you won’t admit it happened.”

 

 

* * *

“Chewie?” Finn asks as they’re setting up the next run. They’re hoping to get shipstones at Elysium, take all but two of them (Two are coming home to them here. If they’re even half as good a power source as the journals say, they’re going to have a lot of good uses for them.) to R’Jiria, in R’Jiria they’re planning on picking up more transteel paneling, along with high-nitro soil, again, most of that will move onto Kettal, but some of it will come home with them for the micro farms, in Kettal they’re picking up things just for them, Rose and several of the children have put together lists of plants they want to eat, so seedling flats, and then they’re off to Cloud City, the next step in Operation Break Canto Bight: Get Finn A Good Suit is up.

It should take them eight days, and it should be pretty straightforward flying. The only contraband on the _Falcon_ for this run is him and Chewie. And, with any luck, those fake IDs Poe got them are good enough that if they get boarded, they’ll stand up. 

Chewie looks up from the pad where he’s doing the navi calculations. He grunts a _What?_

“Rey says you’ve met Padme.”

He rolls his eyes.

“What’s the story with him?”

_He’s Rey’s husband. How much more story do you need?_

Finn almost allows himself to be distracted by the term Chewie chose to use for Padme, but decides he can think about that, later. “Come on, I know you know more than that.”

_Of course I do. Doesn’t mean I’m saying more._

Finn’s voice is serious. “Chewie… We don’t know him. We can’t see him. The deep cover in the Order stuff is… shit. Everything about this sets my danger sense off. Last night… something happened, and I’ve got no idea what, other than, I guess we saw Padme, and he wiped our minds rather than let us remember his face… Chewie, this is _wrong!_ ”

Chewie sighs, it’s a long, deep sound. He nods. _Do you trust Rey to know what’s best for herself?_

“Yes, but…” He looks around, voice low. Finn’s not averse to a hot bit of gossip, but this is personal in a way most of the fluff they shoot around isn’t. “Jacen said she was crying.”

Chewie looks alarmed at that.

“And I don’t… There’s just this _blank._ I can’t think of anything that would make her cry, you know? But she was there, and then he was there, and Jacen said she was crying, and she’s gone now…”

Chewie’s eyes narrow.

“He wouldn’t hurt her, would he?”

_If he did, it’s the last thing he’s ever going to do._

“Of course, but… She’s gone, and…”

_I’ve got this._

“How?”

_I just do._

“Chewie?”

He shakes his head. _Not for you. Not right now._  

“I hate this.”

_I know. Bring it up with Rey. He’s her secret to keep._

Finn’s eyes narrow, and then he nods, leaving the ship.

 

 

* * *

 

 

There are words Rey’s never used. Not to Kylo, not in her own mind. Not about herself.

Words like: abandoned, worthless, unlovable.

Words like: burden and slave.

Words like: abuse and rape.

Words she’s never let form in the depths of her mind. Words that have never touched her tongue or lips. Words that are unspeakable, unthinkable, because thinking them, speaking them, makes them real, and if they’re real they have to be dealt with.

There are things she’s never let herself feel. Sensations kept long-banished because she never named what happened to her. Blame she never placed, so feelings couldn’t be attributed.

Rage, hate, rejection.

She’s never let herself aim those at the people who sold her into bondage for a quick drunk. Never let them blossom in her heart. Fate and the Force can be awful, but there’s nothing to be done about it. No one’s fault, nothing _personal._

But her life on Jakku wasn’t a quirk of fate. It wasn’t a bad decision made of bad circumstances, giving her the best life they could. Her fate, every day of it, was the manifestation of a deeply _personal_ abnegation of love and responsibility.

Opening her mind to it, she can remember. She was worth three bottles of rotgut. “Skinny, little thing. She won’t last long here.” Plutt had said that, and then held out three bottles. And they grabbed them, fast, eyes shining with the longing that should have been hers.

Her mother scooped them up the way Rose gathered Paige in her arms.

And that’s why that gesture broke her.

And Kylo holds her while she finally acknowledges the past, so she can start to put herself back together.

 

 

* * *

This time the knock is certainly tentative. And it’s not the sound of C8’s metal knuckles on Kylo’s metal door.

He can feel Kinear on the opposite side of it, and knows whatever it is, it’s important enough that he’s decided it was worth disturbing him for.

He looks at Rey, her eyes are bright and skin pink from tears, but she nods, okay with him taking care of whatever this is.

 

 

He unlatches his door, and Kinear looks up at him, seeing him still in last night’s clothing, stubble black on his face, eyes puffy and tired, face pink from sharing Rey’s tears, and for a moment he can feel a pang of sympathy. Kinear’s read the situation well enough to have decided this is a house that mourns. He doesn’t know why, though his guess, that they’d lost a pregnancy, is fortunately wrong.

“This came through an hour ago. Directly for you. General Organa’s personal code. None of us can read it, but…” He offers up the pad.

Kylo runs his hand through his hair, knowing where this has to come from. It’s absolutely confirmed when he looks at it. There are probably fewer than a thousand people left in the galaxy who can read this. Written Thykarann. Chewie could have put the encryption of the Gods on their common tongue and not had it this secure.

It’s short, and he can hear the growls in his head. _She better be okay._

He flips the pad, looking for a sketch program, and scribbles back, fast, _She is. Dealing with parts of the past that won’t stay past. Home tomorrow or the day after._

 

 

* * *

 _She’s fine. Home tomorrow or the next day._ Chewie says to Finn and Rose as they’re helping to set up the third of the microfarms.

“You know how to contact Padme?” Rose sounds astonished as she says it.

_Only an idiot goes where no one can find them. Rey’s not an idiot._

“You know who he is, who he really is?” Rose says, looking up at Chewie.

_Yes._

“How long was he with the Resistance?” Rafe Kenna, who’s also intrigued with the mystery of Padme, asks.

Chewie shrugs. _Wasn’t my job to keep an eye on him._

“What was your job?” Savarah asks.

Chewie smiles a little. _Mostly kept Han from getting killed._ And from there he starts to tell the story of how they accidentally got drawn into the Rebellion because his idiot sidekick fell in love with a princess, and decided to get in good with her by saving a farm boy in over his head.

Setting up a microfarm isn’t exactly fascinating. It’s fiddly work, putting a lot of little hoses together with plasteel beds and rigging lighting for the plants. A good story makes the job a lot more pleasant.

But neither Rose nor Finn forgets that they’ve got a mystery to solve.

 

 

* * *

“You asked about three buns, remember?”

Kylo nods, stroking her hair. He’d mentioned it their first night on the beach, a year and a day ago. She used to wear it that way all the time, and she still does, but less often now, maybe once or twice a month.

“It was so they’d know it was me.”

He just holds her tighter, and wishes he could blow Jakku up all over again.

 

 

* * *

As Luke taught it, healing is a light skill. And maybe, in the sense of knitting broken bone, and setting damaged energy flows to rights, it is, but that’s not what Rey needs, not today.

Right now, a dark embrace, the arms of someone who’s felt, known, survived and thrived through the storm of emotions that feel like they’re going to drown her matters.

When he mourned his mother and all she represented, he didn’t need a guide in the dark. He knew the dark inside and out. He needed someone to remind him that there was life outside, and through, the dark.

She doesn’t need a reminded of life outside the dark; she knows that. She’s intentionally shut herself out of the dark rather than go through it. She needs someone to hold her hand and let her know she’s not alone in the dark.

And if she was the light he needed to get to the other side of the dark, he can be the presence that makes the dark not so lonely.

And today is hard, and it hurts, and it feels like nails raked through raw nerves, acid dripped upon open wounds, but tomorrow will be better, a little, at least. And the tomorrow after that will be better, yet.

 

 

* * *

“So, how was the date night?” Poe asks when he drops by Rose and Finn’s for dinner. He got in a few minutes earlier, and tomorrow he can unload their cargo. He’s got another plasteel dome. They’ll have a proper gym once they get it set up. He’s also got a craps table, so Rey can practice stopping the dice on the right number.

It amuses him to no end that the School of the Maji teaches, apparently, the balance of the Force, and how to cheat at gambling.

“The date was great,” Rose says, smiling at Finn. Fortunately, both of them remember _that_ clearly.

“After wasn’t.” Finn adds, and then explains what happened while the three of them have supper. He wraps up with, “You have to know this guy, _Admiral Dameron._ He’s got his own ship, for the Force’s sake. Who is he?”

Poe blinks and rubs his eyes. Finn’s right, he _should_ know who Padme is. But… “Leia… Because of how she went…” He sighs. “Spies. I got Holdo’s after she died. Each Admiral had their own contingent. Reported directly to us. We didn’t know each other’s. I never knew Leia’s pets. That way I couldn’t endanger them. She didn’t know mine. We didn’t know Ackbar’s… So on and so forth.” He looks at the ceiling of Rose’s cottage. “There were twenty-seven deep cover spies I never met. They knew _me._ And I knew their call signs. Someone tells me it’s rainy on Bothan, and I know they’re one of Leia’s. They tell me what day and month it’s raining, and I know which one they are, but…” He purses his lips and looks annoyed. “Ren interrogated me once.” He licks his lips. “I’d have rather been tortured. It hurts, you scream a lot, and eventually they give up or you die. But there’s just _nothing_ you can do when he’s in your mind. Doesn’t matter what you try, what you think about, how much you try to hold back… He’s going to find it. So… I couldn’t contact them. They could find me, but not the other way around.”

“And you never knew Leia’s spies?” Rose says.

 

 

“No.” He thinks for a moment. “I know we didn’t have anyone on the _Supremacy._ So… The _Finalizer_ maybe? That was Hux’s flagship. Keeping eyes on him would have mattered. And… Padme’s Maji, so not sticking him on the same ship with Snoke was likely a good plan.”

“Who’s flying it now?” Finn asks. “Whoever he is, he’s got his own rooms, and enough privacy for her to be there undisturbed. That means it’s _his_ ship.”

Finn thinks. He hasn’t paid attention to this for quite a while. “Captain Mitaka. He jumped, a lot, when we took out the _Supremacy._ Something like a quarter of the First Order officer class got a promotion, often a big one, that day.”

“What’s he look like?” Finn asks.

“Uh… I’ve never seen him.” He thinks as hard as he can, trying to remember anything he knows about him. “He’s a Captain, so command blacks. Dark hair. Dark eyes.”

“Big?” Rose asks.

“I’ve only read the file on him, and I’m about fifty percent likely to be wrong on this.”

“Okay,” Rose says. The three of them look at each other. If Padme is Mitaka… he’d want to keep that as silent as possible, but… Why stay with the Order? It’s… done. Unless… “You think he’s hanging on to take out Ren?”

“Balls of fucking steel,” Poe says, under his breath. “He’s Maji, probably considered himself a Jedi back in the day, and Ren’s the Jedi Killer.”

“Chewie wouldn’t confirm that he knows Padme through the Resistance. He’s really… circumspect about that. But… he knew Luke, and Luke’s Jedi School. Han said one of the students, Ren, killed the others… What if he missed one?” Finn adds.

“You know Ren is Han and Leia’s son, right?” Poe says.

Rose nods and Finn says, “Yeah, we were there when Leia said it.”

“Okay. Well, the Jedi School goes up in flames.” Poe speculates, “Luke calls for help. They go, hoping to get their son, and only find this one last kid… Leia would have taken him in, hidden him, felt like she had to take care of him… Made sure Ren thought he’d killed all of them.”

“Rey said Luke shut himself off from the Force. That’s how he hid for so long. He could have taught Mitaka to do the same. That way he could work his way up in the First Order, get closer and closer, and not get caught,” Rose adds.

“Rey got on and off the _Supremacy_ somehow. It’d make a lot more sense if she had help from the inside,” Poe says.

“Of the _Finalizer?_ ” Rose adds.

“It’s one big computer system. If he had access on one ship, he could mess with a different one,” Finn says.

All three of them look at each other. “So…” Rose says.

Finn half inclines his head. “I guess we just… leave it be.”

Poe nods, and then says, “And you _cannot_ get caught. I promise you, if Ren’s staring you in the face, whether you want to think about it or not, you’re going to let who Mitaka is slip.”

“Fuck,” Finn says. “Damnit.”

Rose nods. “ _Don’t get caught._ ”

He gives her a little half smile.

Poe rolls his eyes. “Let’s hope curiosity didn’t kill the spy.”

  

 

* * *

When Poe gets back to his ship, he digs out the datapad that has all of the Resistance’s intelligence on it. He puts his code in, and reads. They’ve got almost nothing on Mitaka, which… would make sense if he’s one of their spies, but… What they do have… Dark hair. Dark eyes. Fair skin. So, all of that matches the glimpses he’s gotten of Padme, but…

Poe’s seen Padme’s boots, and their file says the man is 1.75 meters tall. There’s just no way he wears boots that big. So… the file is wrong, or he’s not Padme.

 

  

* * *

When Rey goes back to Lirium, her hair is down. And though she’ll wear it pulled back, and up, and in a ponytail, she’ll never put it in three buns again. Her friends will ask if she’s okay, and don’t press too hard when she says she is. She can feel that they feel guilty about something, but she doesn’t barge into their minds enough to ask. Eventually, Finn’s thinking about it loudly enough that she finds out that they’ve decided that Padme is Mitaka.

She doesn’t know who that is, but decides not to mess with it.

Eventually, after a week, on a quiet afternoon, when she gets some time alone with Finn and Rose, she’ll explain what happened, and why, and they’ll hold onto her, and pet her, and she’ll let them, and this time, saying it won’t hurt quite so badly.

But it still hurts.

 

 

* * *

Kylo makes sure his first meeting, before he really ‘gets back to work’ is with Kinear.

He expects to get briefed on what happened for the two days he spent with Rey, and that’s about it, but as soon as Kinear steps into his office, Kylo knows that’s not all that’s coming.

“Another conversation for you to forget and me to remember?” Kylo asks as Kinear sits.

“We’re both fine remembering this one.” Kinear gives Kylo’s hand a gentle squeeze. “Though part of it is for you as a man and part’s for you as a leader.”

Kylo waits, not sure what to do with this. He knows Kinear’s wrong about what happened, but he’s got no good lie ready to cover and really does not want to explain what was actually happening, so… “I’m listening.”

“It hurts. The people who tell you it’s not a big deal, that it happens all the time, or that it’s not really a child; they’ve never been there. And if they’re lucky, they never will. You’ll survive it. Time will pass, it’ll hurt less, and you’ll move through it if you let yourself, but you won’t forget, and you shouldn’t.” Kylo nods, feeling Kinear’s past shaping his idea of Kylo’s present.

“Thank you.”

Kinear gives him a curt nod. “Now for you as a leader. I don’t know what, if anything, you’re planning for an eventual succession for the Order, but… Everything is easier if your heirs, _all of them_ , are legitimate. And for you, Master of the Order, legitimate means not just a marriage certificate to said child’s mother, and matching DNA profiles, but a _public_ wedding of some sort where _everyone_ sees you get married.”

Kylo hadn’t given that any thought at all. So he nods again. “Noted.”

“Good.”

“Tell me about the negotiations with the H’renthnols.”

Kinear understands that Kylo’s not interested in diving any deeper into that subject, so he nods and changes topics. “Going swimmingly. They’re quite interested in tossing off their current leaders and switching over to us…”

 

 

* * *

The people Kylo was supposed to meet with will wonder, and gossip, about where the Master went for two days. Sort of, they know where he was, in his rooms, but they didn’t know why he didn’t attend his meetings.

Some of them asked Kinear why Kylo wasn’t there, and while it’s true that Kinear is the king of gossip, and seemingly knows, and is good for, anything and everything happening anywhere and everywhere, on this one, he shuts them down.

“He’s not attending meetings today, and that’s all you need to know, or _say_ , about it.”

And though this is something that won’t occur to Kylo, it will occur, and be appreciated by Kinear, apparently enough of the underlings are starting to, if not like, then at least respect Kylo enough that when Kinear shuts them down, they stay shut down.

A public figure rarely has any real privacy, and if for a day or two the Master needs it, then he’ll, at least from the people he was meeting, all members of his General Staff, get it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any speculations about The Force deciding to help keep Padme under wraps are certainly warranted. 
> 
> And, yes, for my Heinlein fans, Shipstones are stolen from him. Somewhere, out there, Lazarus Long is flitting about the galaxy with Mama Mo, Mike, a certain kitty cat, and all the rest of them.


	42. Twelve Percent

10/7/1

 

One banker, on behalf of himself and his two absent sisters, meets with eleven other heads of state.

It has taken a while for them all to empty their schedules and find a place where they could all gather discreetly. Officially, the twelve of them are not only not meeting, they aren’t even all in the same system.

But they are meeting, because what had been a nuisance, a nuisance that should have burned out by now, doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, and worse, it’s growing.

Much to their annoyance.

 

 

* * *

Everyone at this gathering knows everyone else’s name. They know each other’s systems. They know each other’s balance sheets down to the credit. They all hold stock in each other’s companies. They are, in many cases, bound by both marriage and treaties to each other.

They _know._

They are survivors. A republic lasted a thousand years, through fussing and fights and annoying debacles and all the ups and downs of myriad political turmoil, and they weathered the storm. The Republic fell, a man proclaimed himself Emperor, and they shifted alliances, moved credits, offered the right bribes to the right people at the right times and made the right observances, and they weathered the storm. An Emperor died, a new Republic rose, civil wars raged, and they kept going.

Power is eternal and immutable. It can be moved around, it can be condensed or spread out, it can be gathered close or lost, but it doesn’t go away. And they are the masters of maintaining power.

And they are concerned. It’s a funny thing, just a little opportunity sprinkled around in the wrong, or maybe, right, places. Suddenly, systems that had been impervious to Republics, Empires, Republics again, and on and on, are shifting, moving, and things are getting _expensive._

Of the twelve of them, only seven of them are dealing with the inconvenience of The Order, yet. The other five though… They know what’s coming. The question is, how bad will it hurt, and if this is the kind of disease where one attacks it with everything one has to kill it, fast and messy, and limp away missing a limb or two, but secure in long-term survival, or let it grow and hope to adapt to it.

 

 

* * *

Amelda Long, Queen Regent of the Unified Federation of Blytheen Systems, highest ranking monarch of a court of monarchs, representing nine systems, 187 planets, and more than one hundred and seventy trillion people scattered out over a million light years of space, starts the meeting. “We know why we are here.”

They all nod.

“I guess, the first and most important question is, is Starkiller and it’s ilk fully out of the picture?” At least, the most important question to her. Anything smaller than Starkiller cannot take out enough of her holdings to be worth worrying about.

Myrton doesn’t let the smirk show on his face; she’s thinking in terms of ground, not in terms of people, or for that matter, talent.

The more he’s thought of Kylo’s comments about people not systems, the more he watches what The Master is doing, and the more he dwells on his own family’s rise to power, the more he’s seeing a pattern. The Ygrines didn’t gain power because they had ground. They got ground because they had people. People with a good eye for investments. Those investments brought in capital, and they loaned it out and invested it further, and eventually began gathering ground.

The more he thinks about it, the more opportunity he sees in this model. Kylo may not know it, but he appears to be making the traditional play of the Merchant Prince. Or, perhaps, given the line of work he appears to be in, security, the Mercenary Prince. They’re mostly the same. The only question is, can he, as a successful Merchant Prince must, defend his holdings as he amasses them?

Not all of his colleagues have made this mental shift. Long hasn’t, and she’s how old systems finally die.

Robbeth Han’Lith, not a head of state, in the traditional sense, but the CEO of a twenty-five system spanning mining corporation, the second largest in the galaxy, behind the Calrissian Corp. replies, “He’s still got the plans to build one, but we know for a fact that he’s not consuming enough materials to build a new one. When Snoke built his, he spiked the market for any sort of steel and condensing crystals. The market for them is up, but not enough for something that big.”

“Ships. Dreadnoughts and what they’re calling Citykillers,” Chadwick D’Anijo, Emperor Pro-Tem of the Durlano System, main supplier of the crystals used to make Citykillers, replies. “Orders for synth Kyber are down. He’s apparently decided a fleet of twenty-six thousand of them is enough. He’s dropped orders to replacement rates, and since they’re all new, he’s not replacing too many of them.”

“Or he’s run out of pilots.” F’rather Hurr, Vice Mogul of Consoldated Shipping replies. Like Han’Lith, he’s not the head of a state per se, but of a corporation so large and expansive that it might as well be one. “We all are. Between the loss of the Hosnian system, Starkiller, most of the _Supremacy_ , and the Resistance, we’re down almost 22% on pilots, and 38% on combat pilots.”

“How fast is he training them?” D’Anijo asks, and Myrton can tell he’s hoping Kylo is just low on pilots. He’s doing very well selling synth-kyber, and he’d like to continue doing well with it. If Kylo gets out of the Citykiller business, that means D’Anijo will be left with small militaries and mining companies, more than enough to sustain his empire, but not build it.

“No faster than anyone else. Even the Master with his Jedi magic can’t wish pilots out of the ethers,” Hurr, who is also scrambling for pilots, replies.

“No, he just offers better money and accommodations and woos ours away from us to him. He’s pulling mercenaries from across the galaxy with that technique,” Aubery Han Hanthan replies. Again, not a ‘head of state’ per se, but the most well-connected and well-contracted head of a mercenary guild in the mid and outer rim. Myrton knows exactly why Aubery is here. Every step the Order takes into the ‘protection’ business is directly stepping on their toes. They’d been willing to just take it under Snoke, but now…

“He’s got to be getting low on funds,” Long adds.

“He’s beyond low. His liquidation of the Raclan gave him some breathing space, but he can’t be that far away from the edge,” Doobernie Fisk, the Supreme Chancelor of the Omeganth system, replies. They are a fairly small system, but extremely powerful. Something, no one’s sure what, possibly a genetic quirk, possibly superior schooling techniques, maybe a combination of both, has blessed their system with more, and better, slicers than anywhere else in the galaxy. If you need a system secured, or cracked, ninety-three of the top hundred people for the job will be from the Omeganth system.

“He _wasn’t_ that far from the edge, cutting down on his weapons orders has brought him back. He doesn’t have the income, yet, to expand, but… There are rumors.” H’Rthold Corr does not sell weapons. That would be… pedestrian. Nor does he sell the parts that makes weapons. Also, boring and pedestrian. He sells the best computer simulation software for weapons designers. If you want an idea of what a weapon is going to do before you spend the money to design a prototype, you run it through a Corr simulation. Every major weapons designer in the galaxy works with Corr, and they all talk with him.

“Of…” D’Anijo asks.

“He’s taking colonies,” Corr replies. The Polonian military is one of his customers, and they had more than a few things to say about the ‘offer’ the Master hit them with.

“Silly thing to do when you’ve stopped buying weapons,” Han Hanthan says. Myrton again smirks in his head. Spoken like a man who doesn’t understand how the game is shifting under his feet.

“Not like that,” Corr answers. Myrton watches him. He does understand how the game is shifting, and Myrton’s sure he’s ready to play. “He’s pulling an end run around their parent worlds. Taking smaller ones, and gambling that if he offers, ‘protection and assistance’ none of them are going to be willing to go up against him.”

Twelve heads of state share a look. None of them are in a position to tangle, alone, with the Order. All twelve of them together… Maybe… Except. They share that look again.

“How long would it take for us to build up a functional military force?” Long asks. That’s the thing none of them have wanted to say out loud, but… Needs to be said. Unfortunately, saying it, they’ve given each of the others a valuable piece of intelligence with which to sell out the other eleven. Assuming the Master has enough coin or power to make throwing in with him worthwhile.

“One large enough to take on the Order?” Han Hanthan, the mercenary, says. “Six to eight years, and in six to eight years, he’ll be six to eight years-worth of expansion bigger. And will still have the plans for Starkiller, which we don’t.”

“That’s a fixable situation,” Fisk, king of the slicers says.

Han Hanthan smirks. Myrton is sure why. He doesn't know, exactly, how Starkiller worked, but if The Master keeps his people on ships, with just outposts on planets, they won't be able to use something like Starkiller to destroy him. They can hurt him with it, but there's not a ship flying that's big and still enough for something like Starkiller to hit it. He does know, that if Fisk gets those plans, that the other eleven of them are going to be given an offer to 'safeguard their futures' and Long likely has the men and material to build one.

“Will he keep expanding his military?” Corr asks. As soon as he got wind of what a Citykiller was, he ran the simulations himself. And promptly came to the conclusion that he was _not_ going to get on the wrong side of the Master. Not without a first class fleet of fighters of his own, which he not only doesn’t have, he also doesn’t have an interest in getting. Not with the cost of pilots where it is now.

“Good question. No one’s been able to ferret out if he’s scaling down weapons investments because he’s changing tactics or because he can’t make payroll if he doesn’t, or some combination thereof,” DiAnijo says.

“It’s got to be a change of tactics. If it were just about credits… He’d just take them, wouldn’t he?” Han Hanthan half-says and half-asks.

“Snoke certainly did,” Fisk adds.

“But, since the Raclan, he hasn’t. The Raclan wasn’t _that_ well-funded, was it?” Long asks.

Myrton shakes his head. “It was a rich target, but not _that_ rich. Plus, it’s been more than a year. He used most of it to pay off debts and most of the rest to keep the flow of droids moving.”

Long makes a sour expression. “Fucking droids. He’d be done if he hadn’t pulled that move. We’d have no problem at all getting the support we’d need to take him out if he’d been stealing slaves right and left.”

“That’s another issue,” Myrton says, “take him down too quickly and we’ll break the droid market. I don’t know about you, but we’ve moved considerable funds into that to cover what used to be made from weapons and ships.”

That gets quite a bit of nodding, too.

“With a side of, if the droid market goes soft, not only do we lose out on our holdings, but getting replacements and repairs for our current droids will be more difficult, too,” Fisk adds. He doesn’t have to say, but they all know, that a lot of his people make a lot of their money corrupting ‘incorruptible’ droids.

That gets a lot of sighs.               

“It gets worse,” Amalthea L-Onn of the United Federation of the Qualee System says, “In non-slave cities where he has recruiting stations, the cost of unskilled labor is up 12% in the last year. Semi-skilled labor is up 8%. That ripples through the surrounding areas, spreading to a range of as large as 5,000 kilometers. People move to where the better wages are, and right now, we’ve got to pay better to get people to stay with us, rather than go with him.”

That gets a lot of looking at each other, too. If they are going to attempt to raise a military large and well-armed enough to go up against the Master, they’re either going to have to conscript en masse, or offer a better deal than the Order does, and no matter what, the cost of labor continues to rise.

“The cost increases are an annoyance, one we can swallow by increasing prices, what of the ideas…” Corr says. Myrton watches him, and knows, he _gets_ it.

That gets another long sigh.

“No one’s come back from the Order, yet, but he’s thinking ahead. His offer to the Polonians involved unlimited right of return for ten years.”

That gets a collective wince. Any member of the Order who returns to their homeworld, returns as a citizen of the Order, their children will be citizens of the Order, and whenever Ren brings up his fancy elections, they’ll be involved, paying attention, _talking_ about what they’re doing.

Spreading _ideas._

“How did Polonia even go for that?” Long asks.

“He offered ‘protection’ in exchange for a colony joining the Order,” Corr replies.

“And they took that deal?” L’Onn asks.

“They likely remembered the Raclan, and decided that not engaging in an act of ‘involuntary patriotic exuberance’ was the wiser course,” Myrton replies.

Corr nods at that.

They all glance at each other again. Without a multi-system military and alliance between them… Any day, any issue, and they too could find themselves on the wrong side of the Order.

“How’s it working for them?” L’Onn asks.

“He’s providing adequate protection. No one’s been able to raid them. The colony seems pleased by their new overlords. This citizenship thing of his apparently pleases them. The higher wages likely does, too. But they’re scared. His men are moving onto their planet. He agreed not to set up a recruiting station, and he’s kept to it, but the colonists can travel freely between the colony and the home worlds, and dangerous ideas are starting to flow.”    

Myrton sighs. That’s the worst part of this. Ren’s… competent. He may not be the strategist Palpatine was. But he’s got enough of an idea of how to do this that he hasn’t burned out, yet. His mother’s son, apparently.

“You’ve met him, Ygrine, right?”

Myrton nods. “Face to face.”

“And…” Long asks.

“He’s neither Snoke nor Palpatine. He’s rough. Doesn’t exactly know the waters he’s trying to swim in, and working to learn, fast. He reads minds, which helps quite a bit in learning, fast. You cannot lie to him, and if you’ve got any inkling of--”

“You mean he knew what you were doing.” L-Onn says. “You’ve always been painfully obvious, Myrton. Let me guess, you got a few of your girls prettied up and tried to tie him into your family? And shockingly enough, he wasn’t green enough to fall for it.”

Myrton shrugs. He prefers having his confederates think he’s significantly stupider than he is. And though he certainly would have approved if he could have caught Kylo with one of his girls, he mostly just wanted to see how he responded to them. And he learned what he needed to. In the intervening months he’s hired ten exceptionally pretty and very smart girls to enlist in the Order. Given a few years, they’ll rise to the Officer class, and _then_ he’ll be well positioned for his next move. The Master wants to be loved for himself, then the Master will be loved for himself. And if the Ygrines can benefit from that, they will.

He figures that by the time he’s gotten to the fourth year of his non-aggression pact with Kylo, he’ll have his girls ready to bait several honey-traps, and from there… He’ll be ready for what comes next.

“I’d be interested in seeing how prescient he is in the presence of someone with the sense to keep her cards close to the vest, instead of played out in front, face up,” L’Onn says.

“By all means, Amalthea, play your game. I’ll be fascinated to see how it works,” Myrton replies.

“What are you thinking?” DiAnijo asks

“We have seventeen of his recruiting stations, and they are beyond a nuisance,” L’Onn says.

“What’s happening with them?” Han Hanthan adds.

“Everything you don’t want to happen. Labor costs are rising. Labor goes up, and everything else goes up with it. Our people aren’t enlisting in droves, but enough of them are to make a difference, especially in the smaller cities.” She curls her lip. “Worse, yet, it’s not just unskilled labor heading off. We’re losing some of our specialists. Students who didn’t make it to their top programs are fleeing to him, because he’s got more positions for what we do than we do.”

Fisk smirks. “That happens if you only let the top twenty percent move up to the next class.”

“Yes, well, we still had use and work for the ones who didn’t advance.” The Qualee have a very simple system. They don’t waste resources training people who can't maximize their potential. At any level of their schooling, only the top twenty percent go to the next level. The ones who can’t move up, stay at their current level, maximize their knowledge base of that level, and then go on to do work commiserate with that level of training. And for hundreds of years, that’s worked splendidly.

Except, for now, a student at the 22% rank has _options,_ and they’re running away to take advantage of them.

“And he does, too,” Myrton says with a smirk.

“Yes. It’s one thing if day laborers and farmers are leaving. We can replace them with droids. It’s annoying, but doable. But we’re losing technicians, programmers, and researchers. The week after the program cuts were made, nineteen hundred of our better, but not best, students went to him.”

“That sounds like a small number,” Corr says.

L'Onn gestures elegantly with her hand. “Out of our gross population, it is, but they’re the people who make sure that the systems our geniuses build keep running. We have no problem keeping our best and brightest, but they get bored easily, and don’t tend to enjoy keeping the systems they invent going. We need people to do that.”

“And they’re leaving, because with Ren they get to be the best and brightest,” Fisk says.

Almathea nods, and sighs.

“You’ll be the test case, then? See what happens when someone who knows how to play the game goes up against him?” Long asks.

Almathea nods again. “It will take a little while.”

“You mean to get your family out before you do it?” Fisk asks.

“Of course. I don’t expect he’ll be willing to go to war over seventeen recruiting stations. This should be a good opportunity to see what’s involved in buying him off, but if he does, Han Hanthan, if you wanted to seed some of your own people in, so you could have an… eyewitness view of how this works?”

He smirks. “Honey, I already know how this is going to work. If you don’t take the first deal he offers, if you actually _try_ to take out his recruiting stations… He’s going to hit you, and it’s going to _hurt_. This is not a man who’s going to dither about with negotiations if you go after the only thing that matters to him. The only question is how hard can he hit, and what can you take?”

“Isn’t that something you want to know?” Almathea asks.

“Not first hand. It’s a huge galaxy, and he can’t be everywhere. I’m fine with taking what’s not under his thumb. And if he’s serious about working this as a business, eventually we’ll sit down and set up a deal for subcontractor status. Might as well have him pay me to do what I want to do.”

Myrton thinks that’s a rather sane way of looking at it. He smiles slightly.  

“We’ll see how fast he can move, and what he’ll do if we tell him to leave. He came up with an interesting counter maneuver the last time someone _told_ him what to do. The R’Leah made out well enough with his negotiated settlement. With luck, we’ll work a settlement with him where he’ll only take our undesirables,” L’Onn says.

“With luck,” Long says. “It’s well known that every system has people they could do without. If we could use him to get rid of them…”

The twelve of them can all see the value of that.

Long smirks. “You know… Perhaps we could, encourage a recruiting station or two, and then begin using it as part of our justice system. Many of our criminal types could possibly become useful members of society if they had a few years somewhere else and gained some skills before coming back to us.”

“Jail or the Order… that’s an idea,” Fisk says.

“A way to cut costs on our… problematic subjects,” Long says.

That has a susurrus of interest spreading among them. L’Onn nods. “We’ll request he remove his stations. He’ll offer some counter. We’ll respond with a different one, ask for droids to replace our laborers. He’ll turn us down, too expensive. We’ll counter that he bend on his ‘everyone welcome’ policy. We’ll let him take _almost_ everyone, just… none of our Mid-Grade or higher grads. Everyone is happy. He gets people. We get rid of people. We’ll get to see what happens when he’s up against someone who can actually negotiate.”

Myrton grins at her. “Everyone wins.”

The rest of them look quite satisfied.

 

 

* * *

Three days later, a banker says to his sisters. “The Qualee are going to test him.”

They nod, looking interested.

“And… are we going to… increase the tension of the test?” Bellie asks.

“I was thinking, we have substantial shares many of the major Qualeen corporations. Were we to sell short, say… two or so days before they have a military disaster, utterly destabilizing their system, it would certainly benefit us greatly,” Myrton says.

Andromeda checks their balance sheets. “It would. How… sure are we that they’ll have said disaster?”

“Well, having spoken to three of the families who stand to benefit directly if several of the Oligarch families were to… have an accident, I think we can accurately predict that said disaster will happen within hours of it.”

The banker and his sisters share a smile. Power is eternal, but who holds it isn’t, and they intend to take advantage of that.


	43. Survive

10/23/1

 

“We’re gonna die, we’re gonna die, we’re gonna die, we’re—“

Chewie’s _shut up_ howl finally gets Finn to quiet down. There are a lot of things Chewie appreciates about Finn. He’s smart, knows what he doesn’t know, doesn’t shoot his mouth off when he needs to keep quiet, and respects Chewie enough to know that he’s the guy in charge here.

All of which he approves of.

But if he could be a _tad_ quieter when danger rears its head, Chewie would appreciate it.

There’s something to be said for a guy who can at least pretend not to be panicking, and that’s the one thing Finn’s shit at.

Granted, there’s an Order Star Destroyer holding them in their tractor beam, so it’s entirely likely Finn’s not exactly wrong in his current assessment of the situation.

Though Chewie’s hoping he is.

Right now, on the way home, they’re not carrying any contraband, so that’s one good thing. And maybe… And Chewie’s halfway between a hope and a prayer, because it’s nothing he’s even thought about suggesting to Rey, and she can’t imagine she ever sat down and spelled it out to Ben, but…

Maybe…

If they’re lucky…

If this love thing matters…

If _Kylo_ ’s worth more than a bucket of warm spit…

If…

“What do you mean _be calm?_ I am a wanted deserter, and a traitor, both of which get you killed so dead by the First Order you don’t even have time to blink. And so many people have a price on your head that they’re going to get into a bidding war as soon as it goes out that they’ve got you.”

Chewie just looks at him.

“Can’t we punch our way out of this?”

Chewie inclines his head. Finn knows just as well as he does that once they’re in the tractor beam, they’re going nowhere but where the Destroyer wants them. And, from the way they’re slowly easing into the Destroyer, apparently where they want them is on that ship.

Chewie howls at Finn and Finn nods.

“Yeah, I’ve got my false ID. You got yours?”

_For whatever it’s worth._

They hear the clunk of the Falcon’s landing gear touching down in the Destroyer. Finn takes a deep breath and makes his face go calm, and only slightly annoyed, like it would be if they were just two other guys, on the last leg of a trading run. “We’re about to find that out, real fast.”

 

 

* * *

“Finn Tico and Huryynanth. Traders from Coruscant going to Lirium.” Lt. GP-9908 of the Order says, looking at their IDs, bored. Both Finn and Chewie get the sense that he does this all day, every day, and if he could be doing something else, he would, but this is the job, so he’s doing it. “Not much there, right?”

 _New settlement._ Chewie nods over his shoulder. _Got supplies for ‘em._ That’ll check out because that’s what they’re carrying. Behind them, in the Falcon, four men in stormtrooper outfits are rummaging through their stuff, and, for once, finding exactly what's on the manifest.

“They got a mechanic there? That thing looks like the only reason it’s still moving is the Force smiling on you.” GP-9908 is professional; he’s being nice, nothing assholish about him. But he’s doing his job, making sure that no one brings contraband through J’doran space. And, from the looks of it, he’s going to do his job, no matter what.

He’s exactly what a Hux-grad is supposed to be. Competent to handle any job, anywhere, for as long as need be.

And as long as they play along, they’ll have no problem with him.

Finn gives them his best smile. “Best one in the galaxy, my wife.”

“Good. Because that thing’s not going much of anywhere else without any help.” His datapad beeps. “You check out. Once we're done the visual inspection, you can go.”

 

 

* * *

Finn waits until they’re in hyperspeed again, to say to Chewie, “Did that really just happen?”

Chewie gently whacks him in the shoulder.

Finn rubs it. “Ow!”

_You’re not dreaming._

“Think they put a tracker on the Falcon?”

_If they did, Rose’ll find it._

“Should we even take it to them?”

_We told them where we were going. If it’s there, she’ll find it, and figure out how to make it tell them we’re playing by the rules and only go where we’re supposed to be._

 

* * *

 

 

When Finn gets home, he spends a _long_ time holding Rose and Paige. Excitement on his runs isn’t uncommon, but there’s excitement and then there’s _excitement,_ and he could go a very long time without ever seeing the inside of an Order Destroyer again.

Without ever seeing who he _could_ have been. They said he’d be an officer, eventually, if he put the time in. By now… He could have been Lt. FN-2187. He could have been a minor functionary, working his way toward being a major player… maybe…

Or dead. The odds of him not having been on the wrong part of the _Supremacy_ or getting off Starkiller…

He kisses his wife and snuggles his baby girl, making himself breathe deep and easy, making the shakes stop.

Rose is looking at him, “How bad was it?”

He blinks. “Honestly, not that bad, but… You ever feel like you stared at a mirror of yourself, of who you could have been, and just… felt ice down your back?”

“No.”

He nods. Of course not.

She strokes his face, and gently kisses him. She may not be able to feel it, but she’s got enough empathy to imagine it, and that’s enough.

 

 

* * *

 _Your man took us off the register, didn’t he?_ Chewie asks Rey as the two of them are unloading the shipstones. This time next week, they should have it completely set up, wired into the dome that’s become their training gym, and _soon_ it should be warm enough for the kids to run around, exercise, and play in there, no matter what.

Rey smiles. “If he did, he didn’t tell me about it. How close were you?”

_Took our IDs and retina scans. If we were still in there, we’d have come up._

Rey feels pleased all over at that. She also decides this is a good opening to mention something to Chewie. “Along those lines… He’s… been looking for things to do with the _Supremacy._ Something to make it worth keeping up. It’s big, and has a lot of space, and a lot of soldiers in it. If… anyone were to decide they wanted a neutral meeting place with a lot of security, and the ability to house a huge number of people or things…”

Chewie makes a surprised sounding growl. There are, all over the galaxy, places like what Rey’s talking about, but they’re normally small. And they don’t usually have the kind of numbers to really _secure_ the peace. That’s a good two-thirds of what keeps Maz in business, but she’s only set to deal with a few dozen people at a time, tops.

_You leave your goods, your buyer leaves his cash, Ren guarantees the deal?_

“Something like that. Or, you need a place to meet someone, but everyone is wary of a fight, and no one wants to give an inch of intel on their own home turf, so you meet with him, in his space, and he guarantees everyone’s safety.”

_Guarantees anyone who breaks the peace gets hurt for trying it._

“Yeah.”

_Lando did stuff like that with Cloud City. The New Republic hated it, because people would use his space for deals, use his company to clean the money, claim the goods were stolen, and then claim the loss as a tax write off. That was probably more lucrative than the mining._

Rey blinks at that. “Lando fought to set up the New Republic.”

_And he was the first Senator from Cloud City. Didn’t mean he didn’t know a good deal when it came up and bit him on the hip. Hell, he’s the one who got the legislation passed that made it legal to write off stolen/lost goods on your taxes._

Rey decides this is the sort of situation where it’s better to laugh than cry, so she laughs.

 _He would have ended up owning half the galaxy if he’d lived longer. If there was a way to make money, and look stylish doing it, Lando was on it._ Chewie thinks about it more. Men like Lando are always useful to men like him, if they can be trusted. _I can pass the word around, not sure if anyone’ll take him up on it._

“People need to trust that he can do it?”

 _Anyone who’s paying attention knows he_ can _do it. The question is, can he keep the secrets? You run a deal like that, you’ve got to trust that the person you stole the stuff from didn’t get a call five minutes after you’ve set a place for the deal. Gotta hope that whoever’s hosting the party won’t decide the price on your head is higher than the price of his security and put you in chains as soon as you get there._

“Assuming you didn’t steal it from The Order, in the first place, or the price on your head isn’t one set by the Order, I don’t think you’d have any issues with him.”

Chewie gives her a look that indicates he’s not entirely willing to rule the idea out, but he’s not convinced, either.

 

* * *

Hours later, when Rey tells him about it, Kylo touches his side, finger running over the scar left from the bowcaster, and then says, “He didn’t have to miss. We’re even.”

“You call that a miss?”

“Compared to taking my head off, yes.”

“So, if it’d been Poe’s ship…”

He shakes his head. “I took them all off. I cleared the entire Resistance from our wanted list. I didn’t exactly announce it or anything. You’d have to actually _look_ for it to see I’d done it, but… The war is over. It’s time to move on.”

“Yes.”

 

* * *

 

There are things that Lt. GP-9908 could gossip about if he were so inclined. And then, of course there are things that he can't, because he doesn't know that anything even remotely out of the ordinary happened today. So, at the end of the day, when he sits down at the canteen, to have a beer and supper, he doesn't talk about the wookie and his partner, because why would he? He handled dozens of inspections today. And that was just another one.

No, as he's relaxing, he chats with a few of his co-workers about the new armor that's supposedly coming down the line, and how this new stuff is supposed to be able to take blaster hits, and how field soldiers are supposed to be getting it first, but, one day, maybe, they'll get it, too. 

And he certainly wouldn't mind better armor, but he also wouldn't mind not getting it, because not getting it means that they don't expect him to see any fighting, and he rather likes not having people shooting at him.  
  
But he doesn't have anything to say about the Traitor and the Pirate, because he doesn't know he had them in front of him.

 


	44. Righteous Dark

11/1/1 

 

“Who’s up, next, C8?” Kylo asks.

“Carella D’Vrys, the ambassador from the Qualeen system.”

Kylo shakes his head. He’s got no idea who that is. “Tell me more.”

“A small system, rich, on the edge of the core worlds. It’s three inhabited planets, one hard mineral mining planet, closest to its sun, and two gas giants further out. They provide about 2/3rds of the tetra-hydra-flourine market. About twenty-billion people, mostly humans.”

“All right.” There’s a billion plus inhabited planets in the galaxy, 64,000 systems in the chunk of it he’s working with, and he’s got absolutely no idea who these people are. “Do we have any interest in them?”

“We have seventeen recruiting stations on the inhabited planets resulting in a ten thousand or so recruits a month.”

Okay, he’s got interest in them. “Slaves?”

“Unlikely. It’s illegal.”

That many a month means they’re running from something. Slavery was his best first guess, but maybe it’s a terrible system. “Government?”

“Council of Oligarch. Amalthea L’Onn is the current Prima of the Council. Anyone with a net worth of more than 5,000,000,000 credits can buy a place on the council, though they have to maintain that wealth to maintain that place.”

That’s not terribly enlightening. Kylo’s certainly heard of worse methods of picking leaders. “How do you make that sort of money there?”

“Mining, trade, banking… They have a booming medical trade.”

Kylo doesn’t know what that means, and apparently it’s clear enough on his face that even C8 can read it.

“Youth regeneration treatments. Cutting edge cybernetics. Genetic blending.”

“Military?”

“Enough so the New Republic thought cultivating alliance with them was worthwhile. Enough so that Snoke did not directly attack them. Not so much that they seek out to conquer neighboring systems.”

Kylo thinks about that. “Maybe they’re seeking a contract to deal with our wounded. Not like we don’t routinely need cybernetic components.” He makes a note to check on that. Right now, he’s likely the single largest customer for bio-cybernetics, and if he could get the people to get more of that in house… Later… That’s for later.

“They certainly could be, though the Ambassador did not say why she wanted the meeting when she set it.”

“Okay.”

 

 

* * *

Kylo’s been working on navigating the waters of how to greet people and let them know he’s the highest ranking person in the room, without intimidating them into a spineless puddle. His underlings seem to appreciate it, and he’s noticed that things like meetings go better if the people he’s attempting to meet with are not so scared they’re in danger of wetting themselves.

He’s found that greeting people in his throne room, looming over them, tends to make them so nervous it’s hard to get to the meat of whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing. These days, he understands why that was Snoke’s preferred method. He had no interest in working _with_ anyone, he just wanted to suck all of the fear and pain he could out of them, and then destroy what was left.

Since Kylo’s attempting to actually rule, he can’t keep using that technique, unless he already knows the outcome of a situation, and wants whomever he’s dealing with to fear him.

These days, he generally meets with other heads of state or ambassadors in his office, sitting behind his desk, leaving the throne room empty. Walking through it seems to have a much milder, yet still slightly unsettling feel to it.

Likewise, him, alone, not a guard in sight, in his office, behind his desk, in his command blacks, which as he meets with more and more Ambassador-types, are apparently freakishly casual, seems to also have an unsettling effect. He’s not playing the game the way it’s normally played, and that puts people off foot, making it easier for him to see what they want and why they’ve come to him.

He’s taken to keeping his lightsaber in his desk when he’s working. From his side of the desk, it’s perfectly clear that the drawer the saber is in has no front. He can reach it easily, silently, and if he’s not at the desk he can pull it to him without hesitation, but like Kinear says, if you’re working for peace, maybe you don’t need to be sitting there with a weapon on your person.

He doesn’t stand up when they enter. And he doesn’t shake hands. He’s exiled both of those bits of theater to formal gestures like state dinners.

 

 

So, he sits at his desk, and watches the Qualeen Ambassador walk across his office. As she gets within a few feet of his desk, he pulls a chair out for her with the Force. It is, as Luke would say, a trick, but it’s a trick that puts most people in their place.

It’s not hostile, but it is a vivid reminder that he can bring so much more fight to a fight than they can.

She sees the chair pull out, raises an eyebrow, and then elegantly seats herself in it.

Carella D’Vrys looks like the kind of woman who has not only never been intimidated, but might not actually know the definition of the word.

She puts him in mind of a friend of his mother… He only met her a few times, as a child, though she certainly burned her name into the memory of anyone who was on the Supremacy, Amilyn Holdo.

She’s tall, slim, elegant. Holds herself with the easy grace of the truly confident.

She looks young, but he’s certain there’s no way she’s actually a teenager. With his eyes closed, just going by the feel of her, he’d say she’s closer to fifty. Apparently C8 was not exaggerating when he mentioned ‘youth treatments.’

“Madam D’Vrys, what brings you to my office?”

“Master Ren, I’m here on behalf of the Unified Planets of the Qualeen System.”

He doesn’t roll his eyes, but he’d assume that if you’re an _ambassador_ that’s to be taken for granted.

“Of course.” He waits for her to get to why she’s here.

She doesn’t say anything, and then he gets it. There are rumors that he can read minds, and she’s testing to see if he can pick it out of her head unspoken.

“Yes, I can. I prefer not to. Again, what brings you here? The likelihood of me offering it to you drops the longer you play games with me.”

“You have a recruiting station in each of our largest cities. We’d like you to remove them.”

Well, that was blunt. He wasn’t expecting her to get to it that quickly, or to make that request. It makes him blink, and he can see she’s also surprised that he wasn’t expecting that. “Why? You aren’t a slave planet.”

“That’s exactly why. You offer slavers a droid to replace their workers. Because ours receive a wage, when they leave, we’re left in the lurch.”

“You would like us to offer… a droid to whomever my recruits used to work for?”

This time he’s hit her with something she wasn’t expecting. He can feel that he was supposed to just turn her down flat. At least at this point in the negotiations. There’s something she wants, he can feel that, but… it’s not droids, but she’s keeping her mind so tightly clenched he can’t… well, won’t… pull it out. “No. We’d like you to close up shop and leave. Your recruiters are destabilizing in an inappropriate way.”

“Destabilizing how?”

Her voice is icy. “Are you honestly trying to make me believe you don’t know?”

He can feel what she’s afraid of. Maybe. Again there’s something deeper, but she’s keeping it closed down. This woman has a formidable mind. She’s used to keeping her thoughts tightly controlled. He spends another moment just feeling her. Maybe she doesn’t want him to know what he’s taking from her… Maybe.

He does know her top thoughts, that legions of his citizens coming home at the ends of their terms is not in her best interest. That they’ll spread _ideas._ He’s not sure how fast it’s spreading. By his best guess, it’ll be at least twenty years before he’s got enough of his citizens retired anywhere to be a problem for anyone, but… Obviously she… they think this is going to move faster.

“I honestly want to know how you think it’s working out on your planets. We can’t come to an accord if we don’t communicate.” He’s feeling like that’s a pretty good line and he might want to use it again.

“The ones who leave tend to be in low-paying sectors. In order to keep them, we have to pay them more. That drives up the wages in those sectors, which increases prices everywhere else.”

She’s falling back on economics, so he hits back with economics. “Droids would take care of that. What you’d save on wages for one of them would more than take care of any raises you’d have to offer the others to get them to stay.” Though at this point, he’s got no idea how he’s going to pay for even more droids, but he doesn’t think it’s going to matter, she’s not going to take him up on this. Droids aren’t what she wants.

Her eyes narrow slightly, and he can feel it. Just the idea that they might, at some point, be citizens is spreading _fast_. Whether they’d contemplate joining the Order or not, it’s starting to get them thinking about _more._ He’s not just putting pressure on her system in terms of wages, but it terms of _rights._

“Ah… We’re putting _inappropriate_ thoughts in their heads. Your people are subjects. They have no real control over their own lives until they amass great wealth, and unless they’re brilliant, or beautiful, or already in a family of great wealth, they can’t get great wealth. When they hear about my system, they start to want something similar. They want a chance for some control over the state they belong to.

“Right now, there aren’t many of them choosing The Order, but you fear that those numbers will increase exponentially, especially after members start getting out and coming back.”

DeVrys blinks. “That’s… concise and not particularly nuanced, but accurate enough. They are laborers. They do not have the information or the capability to understand the information to make the sort of good decisions necessary to run a stable system.”

He knows she’s lying about something there, but not what. This woman would be a holy terror with Force skills. “Interesting. I’d think that would be my problem, after all, they’ll be voting for me to do things, not you.”

“For a week. And then they’ll start demanding a vote from us, too.”

He shrugs that off. “People don’t enjoy being treated like livestock. Amazing. What will you do to make it worth my while to leave?”

Her eyes are cold. “I think you are misunderstanding. This is being offered as a polite request, but it is an order. The Council of Oligarchs of the System of Qualeen is _telling_ you to remove your recruiting stations from our sovereign territory. You are no longer welcome within the borders of our system.”

“Ah.” He feels… something… It’s not a threat. There’s… supposed to be more to this. It feels a little like when Schiff was more or less daring him to succeed at being a person. Though, this is genuinely antagonistic. She wants something from him, but… She wants control of the script, and right now she doesn’t have it. She’s trying to reclaim it. “I’ll consider it. Would you consent to wait a day, let me talk to my advisors, before rendering a decision?”

She stands, and he can feel her relief. He’s behaving ‘appropriately’ apparently. “Certainly, Master Ren.”

He offers her a smile. “Thank you.”

 

 

* * *

He hasn’t even assembled his commanders when C8 says, “We’ve gotten the first distress call, sir. Your stations are under attack.”

That surprises him, too. There was no hint of a threat in D’Vrys. She had something behind the façade, a blade on her ankle, or the diplomatic equivalent, but… not this.

Well, he’s got a response for nasty surprises. The First Order pretty much only ever had one strategic play: overwhelming, crushing, force. And though Kylo assumes there will be times for other tactics, he’s thinking now isn’t one of them.

“Mobilize everything we can move. Get my personal fighter ready, and have it hooked into the command system. Get my fleet in the air, and the citykillers armed and ready. I want transport ships, big ones, at each of our recruiters, with any and all protections necessary to get them on the ground and our people on them. We’re taking our recruiters, and any recruits, and then we’re blowing their capitol and every city where they mustered an attack off the map.”

“Yes, sir.” C8 goes quiet, and Kylo knows he’s conveying those orders. He nods, striding, fast, to his room to suit up and get ready to fight.

“Get my Stormtroopers the biggest flags the Order has, and find out whichever city is the biggest one that will be left when we’re done. Tomorrow, our colors will fly from every state building in that city, and we’re naming it the new Capitol of Qualeen, under the Order.”

“Yes, sir.”

He shuts the door behind him and begins pulling off his blacks, ready to suit up. His saber is already in his hand. He didn’t realize he pulled it, though didn’t ignite it, while he was speaking. He gives it a gentle, loving stroke, and feels his body thrill at this.

He loves this. It’s been more than two years, and he can’t _wait_ to get back into a real fight. He’s seeing his way through it, exploring different possible futures, taking calls from his other generals and admirals, as they get the basic orders and get their own troops into play.

He’s nodding, fastening his belt, as Admiral Lunryt, who controls the furthest region of his space says, “We’re three weeks out, sir, at hyperspeed. You still want us to make the trip?”

“Send a tenth of them. It’ll probably just be an exercise in how quickly you can assemble and get moving, but if this takes longer than expected, fresh troops will come in handy.”

“Yes, sir.”

He’s fastening his helmet, annoyed at his hair getting tangled in the damn thing, and that’s suddenly forgotten as, “You’ve got a fight!” Rey says, appearing before him, looking nervous for him.

Since he’s in head to toe armor, he’s figuring that’s pretty self-evident.

“My recruiting stations are under attack, and I’m about to make sure no one else tries that, again.” He’d forgotten the tone the vocoder added to his voice, and it sounds harsh and alien to both of them.

“I’m going with you.” He’s eager for a fight. He wants this battle, wants to do what he was made for. She doesn’t want a fight. She’s got no desire for blood. But she’s not wanting him going in naked, unprotected. That makes him smile, he’s _covered_ in the best armor money can buy, with an entire army and fleet going with him, and she still considers him undefended if he goes in without her.

He quickly unclasps the mask, and then pulls her near for a kiss. She feels both his lips, and the reason why he’s done that. The armor plates embedded in his combat blacks aren’t particularly visible, but she feels them between her and his skin. As he pulls the mask back over his head, stepping back, he says, “Let me get you real armor, and I would be honored and happy to have you at my back. Until then, no.”

“I could go anyway. Anywhere you are, I can follow.”

He gently squeezes her hands in his, his thumb stroking over the ring he put on her middle finger. His voice deep and harsh from the vocal moderator in the mask. His words are gentle, though. “I know. But I’d appreciate you not doing it. Not without armor. I want to be able to concentrate on the fight, not fear for you.”

She glares up at him. That’s a ridiculously reasonable request, and since he’s already gotten himself armor, it’s not like she can call him out for a double standard.

She reaches up, rests both of her palms against the mask, and steps up onto her tiptoes, he bows down, and though he can’t feel it, he knows she just kissed the forehead of his mask.

“Come back.”

He smiles under the mask, and she can feel how much he’s looking forward to a real fight. “I will.”

And then he’s out of his room, listening to yet another of his commanders giving him an ETA.

As he’s almost left the room, he says to C8, “Find DeVrys, and toss her into a cell. She agreed to give me a day.”

“She’s left, sir.”

“Then shoot her ship down.”

“Sir… She’s an Ambassador. We… guarantee their safety, otherwise they tend to be wary about visiting us.”

His teeth grit. “Then nicely, safely, for her own good, _capture_ her ship, and in a day, when there is no more Qualeen system for her to be an ambassador of, have her executed for treason.”

“Yes, sir.”

 

* * *

He’s in his ship, ready to lead his squadron out, when something hits him. They get 10,000 or so Qualee a month. The Order isn’t exactly filled with them, but that’s a lot of his people with friends, family, and attachments to those planets and cities.

“C8, make sure every one of our recruits from the Qualeen system know we’re coming. Tell them to make sure their friends and family get out of the cities with recruiting stations.”

“Sir?”

“The Order takes care of its own.”

 

 

* * *

Getting planet-side means dogfighting. It’s been almost two years since he’s done that, too, and it’s marvelous.

His TIE isn’t exactly his saber. He’s too far from the threat and from his kills, but it’s something. It’s beautiful black and red death spinning through space, weaving a path of destruction, clearing the way for the fighters and troop transports behind him.

And he _loves_ it.

 

 

* * *

It’s glorious.

He hits the ground, stride powerful, heady, saber bleeding red next to him, all of his power, all of his darkness thundering through him in an electrifying caress.

He figures there’s likely five thousand troops between him and his recruiting station. A decent enough number, beyond overkill to take out _one_ barely fortified building, but not quite enough to stand against a concentrated wave of Order power.

They start shooting almost before the hatch to his ship opens, and he wills them to keep going, shoot faster, shoot more, between the armor and his command of the Force, nothing gets closer to him than his saber. He’s knocking blasts away from himself like an indolent Hutt might flick away flies. Barely any effort is involved, and the flies get the worst end of the deal.

He feels when the first boots hit the ground behind him. Here’s the test of if any of the new armor is any better. He doesn’t just want them shooting at him because it feels good, but because he knows it won’t hurt him.

He grins, nothing here can hurt him. Damage him maybe, but not hurt. Nothing hurts when you’re doing what you love. What you were born for. All the rest of it… That’s just the thing necessary to get him _here._

He closes the distance between himself and the front line, and just a few passes of his left hand sends troops staggering against each other, adding his saber to the mix means that arms and legs and heads are flying, now, too.

He amps his power, letting his hate, his rage, his anger, his _dark_ flow through him, and they break. They’re running, fast and hard, trying to get away from him, knowing that he’s death, and if he gets within range, that’s the end of them.

Blaster fire is coming from behind him now, which means his ground troops have closed the distance, too. He hasn’t bothered to look behind him to see if they’re following, he can feel it.

He gestures with the saber, swinging it in an arc toward their main recruiting station.

He can’t see it through the smoke, but he can feel it has taken serious fire. He was only two hours away, but two hours is a long time to hold out in an unfortified building with only a few dozen recruiting officers and a few hundred utterly untrained recruits. They built a perimeter, enough of one, to provide some protection. There are still people, his people alive in there.

He can feel them. _His_ people, waiting for him to get them out, and to teach anyone who’d dare raise a hand to them… to him… to _never_ do that again.

He smirks. He loves this lesson. Teaching it makes his heart sing. This is what Snoke kept dangling in front of him, but could never give him. This isn’t just _dark._ It’s _righteous dark._ It’s letting every milliliter of his anger, rage, hate, and pain spill out against people who _deserve it._ And it feels _so_ good.

He’s not just dark here, he’s perfect, vicious _justice._ He’s wrath without a breath of mercy, but _deserved_ wrath. Here, now, he’s sheltering dark. He’s the thing in the night that protects his own, and savages anything that would harm them.

And here, now, he is _perfect._ He is power and purpose and everything, anything he ever wanted to be.

If communing with Rey is where he hits his peak of light, this is his peak of dark. And he wonders slightly, in the back of his head, as he halts a blaster bolt aimed at his back, and steps to the side before sending his saber in a wide, decapitating arc, if Rey would be as happy here in peak dark as he is in peak light.

He can see the station ahead of him. It’s battered, but holding, and he can feel, though not hear, the wave of relief. They know he’s coming for them, and that he’s going to get them out. People have died here today. More people will die here, today. But his people won’t go unremembered or unavenged.

“Transport ships, report in.”

He listens, continuing to cut his way through the troops surrounding his recruiting station. They’re moving, but not moved into position, yet. Twenty minute before he can start the evac.

“Squad leaders?” He has to pause in listening to that report, as he gets closer to the station, he, and his men, finally begin to tangle against fighters who aren’t mere blaster fodder. These fights take some effort, and he relishes it. Even the hits he takes, the tiny bites of pain as the occasional fist or foot or vibroblade strikes, make him feel _good. Alive. Valuable._ He can feel his men behind him, surging forward, coming to fight by his side. The last time anyone felt like this about him, he had the Knights of Ren at his command, and though he tries not to think on it too often, he can feel how much he’s missed that. 

“Continue,” he says, at the top of the steps leading to what used to be a recruiting station and is now a battered pile of rubble. He nods, hearing that they are definitely fighting in the sky above him. Much too far for him to see, even if his view of the sky wasn’t clouded by smoke and dust.

The dogfighting is hot, and they are taking minor damage to their destroyers and larger ships, but the citykillers had no problem taking out everything larger than a destroyer in the Qualeen fleet, so it’s only _minor_ damage. He’s got a faint voice in his head telling him that the citykillers are moving into place over the cities.

Kylo scans the battle around him. Not much fighting left. Anyone who wants to drop a weapon and run away from him, he’s fine with letting run. He and his have closed onto the station, and his men are going through, looking for anyone with his symbol on them. Through the smoke, he can’t see his transports coming down, but he can hear them. He can’t see the battle above him in the sky, but he can still hear the reports, and feel the thunder of ships exploding.

A clanking rattle hits him from the left, and he knows that’s not his men. “EAST!” He and his men turn, waiting, he shifts the wind, stirring the smoke, but not really clearing it… Eventually shapes form to go with the sound, armored land cruisers… He sighs. Not what he wants to fight with a lightsaber. The damn things are hardened and have anti-aircraft and troop suppressing guns. He’ll take them on if he has to, but that’s more fire than he’d like to take with just a saber. “Air support.”

“Getting there, sir… I’ve got visual confirmation… Give us…” Fighters go streaking over his head, strafing the cruisers. The noise roars against him for a second before the heat and staggering thud of explosions hit.

Close enough they felt the boom, not so close they took damage from it.

“Thank you, Squad Leader.”

“No problem, sir. There are more of them coming from the west.”

A different voice says, “Not anymore” a bare second after the distant thud of exploding equipment hits them.

“Clear anything that can take a good shot at the transports out of the area,” Kylo orders.

He gets a collection of variations on the theme of “Will do!”

 

 

* * *

Over the next ten minutes, standing in front of the rubble of what used to be his recruiting station in what used to be the capitol of the Qualeen System, he can hear the battle winding down, though not yet done, people keep taking shots at him that he either stops and steps out of the way of, or swats to the side.

He likes this less than the fight, but this is part of the image he’s projecting. Part of what Jon talks about. He’s letting everyone in the universe know they _can’t_ hit him.

He continues to get reports as his different strike teams clear the threats out of each city his recruiters are in.

When the last one calls in, he checks his chronometer. Seventeen hours from now marks exactly one day since the Qualee laid arms against his stations. He switches his feed from just speaking to his commanders to broadcasting on every and all available frequencies.

“This is Kylo Ren, Master of the Order. For the last seven months, we’d been peacefully recruiting all over the United Qualeen System. For the last seven months, your fellow Qualee joined me or not as they saw fit, and we got along in peace and harmony. I did not demand you join me, because I do not want unwilling citizens. Today your government fired on my stations, unprovoked, having decided that allowing you the freedom to choose what to do with your life would be dangerously destabilizing for this system.

“This ends now. Anyone and everyone who wishes to join me, may. My transport ships are waiting and will take _everyone_ who wants to get away from here. What you do after that is up to you, join me, don’t, I do not care. I am providing transport for any who wish to evac with me, no conditions attached.

“Anyone who wants to run… Run fast and run far. Get outside the city limits.

“Anyone who stays… May your gods have mercy on your souls and May the Force be with you.” He feels the wave of fear washing over him. Everyone within the range of his voice is about to panic.

“You have seventeen hours.” And the panic breaks, and he feels the flood of it.

He stands there, in the center of the melee, in the eye of the tornado, relishing it.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Rey thought she would hate this. She thought waiting, knowing he’s in danger, feeling the battle through him, would be torture.

But it’s not.

She can feel it through their bond, through her skin, in her heart and soul, through his. _This._ This moment here, and that moment there, and the thrum of blood, the power of the fight.

She’s spoken about dark but not evil. _Talked_ about an abstract idea. Something she could imagine, but not really live, she doesn’t have enough dark to live it, but she can _feel_ it through him.

If she closes her eyes, and lets herself settle, she can feel the sweat in his hair and on his skin, smell the smoke, see his blade, and his arm extending out, halting the oncoming fire. She can feel his dark, hardening around him into a protective shield of magic and Force.

She can feel that dark extending out, wrapping his troops in that same protective embrace.

He said once, that the job of the Master is to lead and _protect,_ and today, he’s finally, truly _The Master._

 

 

* * *

Seventeen hours is a _long_ time.

And once the fighting is more or less done, they don’t actually need him on the ground.

He returns to the _Supremacy,_ where the first wave of transport ships are coming in, bringing his recruits and people running from the destruction of the main cities. He’ll return them to Qualee, if they want to go, after.

Right now, he’s watching them staring around the main flight deck of the _Supremacy_ , beyond stunned into silence.

He returns to his rooms, takes off the mask, but not the rest of his armor. If he needs to get planet-side again, he wants to be ready to go, fast.

“Bring me Carella D’Vrys, C8.”

“Yes, sir.”

And a few moments later, she’s back. This time, she is not calm and un-intimidated. She’s furious.

“You said you’d wait a day!” she yells at him. Her anger, and feeling of betrayal is real.

“So did you! We were under attack before I moved.”

She shakes her head. “No! I had orders to give you the ultimatum, make sure you understood your stations were not welcome, and see what you’d offer to keep them. We weren’t going to attack.”

He watches and feels and knows that’s what her orders were. She’s so angry her control has shattered, and all of her plans, everything she was here to do today are at the top of her head.

“Whoever was giving you orders didn’t tell you what was going to happen today.”

Her eyes narrow. She’s watching him, and Force talent or no, she knows he’s not lying, either.

“Why did you run?” he asks.

“I was barely out of your office and got word that you’d already given the orders to attack. The man who breaks his word on a truce likely won’t keep it on safe passage and treatment of ambassadors.”

They both understand they got word of the attack at the same time.

“Who let you know of the attack?” he asks.

Her eyes are bitter, planning. “Likely the same person who called the attack. General K’Rias.”

“And where do you think the General would be right now?”

“I don’t know, but I’m sure you can find out.”

Kylo smiles, and it’s a terrifying gesture. “Yes. I can. Like every other Qualee, you have the option of joining me, of staying here to weather the storm and then doing or going where you like, or you may run.” He checks his chronometer. “There are fourteen hours between now and when I destroy every city where you attacked my recruiting stations.”

“You’re… letting people evacuate?”

“I’m offering them transport, too. I, obviously, cannot let you destroy my stations, but I have no need or desire to slaughter bystanders en masse.”

She blinks at him, watching carefully, and then shakes her head. She hands him the comm she wears on her wrist. “It’s my code. You can use it to find the General.”

He takes it, and nods. “Thank you. If you stay here, you will continue to have diplomatic credentials.”

“My life is in my home.”

He scoffs at that. “Your life is in your skin, Ambassador. I wouldn’t risk it for trinkets. Even with my people there, an evac is not pleasant. Stay here, rebuild after.”

“Is that an order?” she bites out, but he can feel she’s also curious, not sure if he’s telling her she can’t go back.

“No. It’s a suggestion. I only give orders to people who have chosen my leadership. That was the idea you found so threatening, correct? That people could _choose_ who they serve?”

She snorts a quick laugh at that. “Good luck, Master Ren.”

He nods at her, and says, “May the Force be with you,” as she leaves.  

 

 

* * *

Six hours later, after he’s set up an office in what used to be the Mayor’s home in Untrrch, what will be the largest city left on Qualee Prime in five hours when his citykillers are done with the planet, General K’Rias is brought to him, he has one question for her. “Were they your orders, or someone else’s?”

 

 

The General smiles at him, a little. Like D’Vrys she looks ridiculously young. Younger than he is. Younger than Rey is, but he has to assume they don’t let eighteen-year-olds mobilize the entire Qualeen armed forces on a whim.

“Mine.” She answers, looking him up and down. “Why?”

He can feel that’s accurate, enough. She isn’t intentionally lying to him, though it’s possible someone suggested to her this would be a good plan. But no one told her to do it.

“Because I intend to cut the head off the person who ordered the attack, and if that wasn’t you, then I would have liked to have known who it was.”

“Me.” She’s remarkably unperturbed about her upcoming decapitation. He wonders idly if she’s been drugged, but doesn’t feel the murk of chemical sedatives flowing through her. He lets his mind flow through hers… not drugs… righteous dark.

Apparently, it’s a dual edged blade, but he knows that. He’s cut himself on his own blade more times than he can count, and he’s rubbing up against it now.

By moving, going after his recruiting station, she’s triggered his attack. His attack has cleared the board for her people to move up.

She quirks a half smile at him. “You’d die for your Order, Master Ren?”

“If need be, General. I’d prefer to live for it, though.”

She doesn’t have to say anything else. He doesn’t know who the person she’s thinking of is. He assumes he’ll find out soon enough, because he’ll end up dealing with whomever runs the Qualeen System when this is done. But, whomever she’s thinking of, it’s warm and fond, laced through with a gnawing desire for power, and the utter, hard, certainty that under that person, things will get better for those she cares about.

He half-inclines his head. If one of his Knights had been willing to sacrifice themselves to take out Snoke, and move him higher… He would have been grateful. And if one of them thought they could take out Snoke by sacrificing themselves… He can see it, knows it would have happened. But none of them thought they could touch Snoke, let alone remove him from the game.

 

 

* * *

“Where are we?” Rey asks a few hours later, as she moves closer to Kylo, going to wrap him in her arms.

He’s at the window looking out. “Untrrch, what used to be the Mayor’s home, and as of four hours from now, the largest city left in the Qualeen system.”

It’s a large flat, with high, wide windows overlooking what, to Rey, looks like an enormous expanse of buildings, most of which have windows glowing gold against black night. At the far left of the window, she sees something black flapping, on the outside. She’s fairly sure it’s the mark of the Order, flying over the capitol building of Untrrch.

She wraps her arms around his waist, resting her head against his back. “Still in your armor.” It’s not a question.

 

 

“Until I get back to the _Supremacy_.”

“Are you going to ask that I leave again?”

“I’d prefer you weren’t with me, here, in a barely secured building, without armor.”

“Then come home with me.”

“If—“

“You have a comm, and they know how to reach you. And, even with armor, I’d prefer you weren’t sleeping in a barely secured building. Come home.”

“I wasn’t going to sleep.”

“Then all the more reason to come with me. Catch a nap, and I’ll guard you sleep, and keep eyes on the comm.”

He nods, and shifts them back to Lirium.

 

 

* * *

He didn’t expect to be able to sleep. His fight, hot and eager, doesn’t exactly go hand in hand with easy slumber. It’s also been twenty-six hours since he’s slept, and when he hits the bed, even in his armor, because if he needs to move fast, he doesn’t want to be scrambling for it, he drifts off, fast.

He wrapped his dark around his men to protect them, put himself between them and blaster fire, and it made his heart sing.

Right now, in their bed, he can sense her light around him, soothing, banishing his high-alert, jangling nerves.

 

 

Her light wraps around him, guarding his sleep, and when he wakes in three hours, he’s tired, but better than he would have been without it, and ready for what comes next.

Before he leaves, he kisses her, and says, “It’ll be on the holovids, all over. If you would fight by my side, I would have you there for this as well.”

She looks tired. “I don’t think you need a protector for this.”

He kisses her again. “Maybe not, but perhaps I want one?”

She kisses back. “Am I your protector?”

“My savior.” He kisses her again, hard.

She’s almost taken aback by that, never having thought about it in those terms, but thinking it, feeling it, feeling where she was before… “And mine.”

He steps back a little, enough to put the mask on.

“Take it off, before you strike.”

“I intend to.”

 

 

* * *

Cities, by nature of being cities, are not build upon fault lines, not if they can help it. So, though each planet of the Qualeen system takes multiple hits from his citykillers, none of them shatter.

And, as he said it would, first thing in the next morning, the largest city left on each of the planets flies his colors. Black banners flutter against blaster marked buildings.

 

 

And before the day ended, by the count of the imperial standard chronometer on the _Supremacy_ , he asks the woman, General K’Rias, kneeling at his feet, if she has any last words before he takes her head off, with his lightsaber, in front of more than a hundred thousand of his troops and a million Qualee, all packed into the Untrrch city center. The remaining 14 million people on his ship, mostly refugee Qualee, and trillions of people across the galaxy watch him, standing there, counting her sins, how she called up the attack, on her own, without the approval of the ruling council of the Qualee, and how that gesture caused everything that’s come since.

How he would hold anyone who took up arms against him _personally_ responsible for it.

How this is the first, last, and only warning the Order is going to offer. Strike it and die.

She doesn’t say anything, just waits, head high, staring up at him.

It’s a fast, clean cut. And he doesn’t need to say anything after it. His troops understand. The Qualee understand. The _galaxy_ understands. Anyone who messes with Master Ren… with his people _…_ will die.

The force of the cheering, from before him and across the rest of the galaxy, all 6.1 million voices calling the Order home, calling him _Master,_ almost knocks him over.

* * *

Myrton listens to the reports, and stares at his sisters. The three of them shake their heads.

“Well, I suppose we now know what happens if we attack him,” Andromeda says.

“Did you hear the rumor, that when she spoke to what was left of the Resistance before disbanding them, that General Organa told them Kylo Ren was her son?”

Since all three of them were together when that rumor surfaced, they certainly remember it.

“You’re starting to think that one may be true,” Bellie says.

“I didn’t see a resemblance when we met, but… The last attack she personally commanded. Ground attack, at least, was at Takodana. The First Order was attacking, and apparently not in force. Her own teams encircled them, shot them up, and then she personally led the attack, on foot, to rescue what she considered her people.”

“Echoes of the past,” Andromeda says.

The three of them nod. 

“Supporting her never hurt us,” Bellie adds.

“But it didn’t necessarily help, either,” Andromeda says.

Myrton taps his fingers together. “He’s ruthless in a way she wasn’t.”

“He can afford to be. She had to take any who offered her friendship. He can be choosy.”

“How many recruits do you think he got from that?” Bellie asks.

“If he can hold the planets… Probably twenty-billion,” Andromeda replies.

“But he won’t… He doesn’t hold planets. How many?” Bellie asks again.

Myrton replies, “Not enough of them. Evacuating the cities means he didn’t become an instant villain, but he didn’t make friends doing that, either. Too many people lost their homes and jobs yesterday. They’ll hate him for that. But outside of the Qualeen System…” They share a look. A leader who will come in, personally, to save his men, _that’s_ going to start alliances shifting.

“You really think he’ll drop those flags in Untrrch?” Andromeda asks.

“He’ll take materials and credits, and probably wrangle some sort of agreement, letting his people set up a government friendly to him,” Myrton rubs his eyes. “I didn’t anticipate K’Rias falling that fast. Or him letting people leave the cities. D’Vrys is already gathering her own coalition, and he’ll likely deal with them, offer ‘protection’ in exchange for more money and materials, and then pull back, letting them run it.”

“D’Vrys? What do we know about her?” Andromeda asks.

“She’s more amenable in our direction than Amalthea was. Not as good as K’Rias, and if she figures out we were behind K’Rias, she’ll be less tractable than Amalthea.”

His sisters sigh.

“Then she better not find out,” Andromeda says.

Bellie offers a tiny smile. “Not like K’Rias is in any condition to talk, not anymore.”

Three bankers watch another few minutes of the holovid, footage from the fight. They see the man in black, flicking away attacks like they barely interest him.

Myrton sighs, hating this, but… “Maybe it is time to see about having a few of our children join the Order.”

Andromeda sighs. “Five years in, and then they can run for the senate… We could… put together an impressive campaign.”

“We certainly could,” Bellie replies.

“And, if he’s serious about doing this, he’s going to need governors, advisors… diplomats…” Myrton says. “He’s begun doing things like state dinners, meeting with people to work out plans. He won’t be able to personally handle all of it, not for much longer.”

They nod, the inklings of a plan beginning.

 

 

* * *

There are stories that Kylo Ren, personally, in his blacks, with his red lightsaber, cut a path through an encircling army to free his men. They say though hundreds of men shot at him, _none_ of them hit. Rumor had it, that as he gave the ultimatum that let everyone know that they had seventeen hours to live if they didn’t join him, that he stood there, glowing _black,_ if such a thing could be possible. They say he led his people out, offered transport to anyone who would join him, and then blew the entire city and everyone left in it off the map.

Most people think that’s ridiculous. When does an Emperor go into battle just to secure the lives of a few hundred peons he’s never met? Blew the city off the map… certainly, anyone who’s looked at a map of any of the planets in the Qualeen System knows he did that, but risk his own life… That’s laughable.

But the ones who don’t… And enough of them are the _right_ people, are very carefully re-evaluating any further dealings with Master Ren. They know that if they give him more chances to do things like that, more people, the wrong people, will join him.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few words on the artwork. Would I like to render Kylo in combat? Yes. Would I have wanted to render Rey kissing the forehead of the mask, OH FUCK YES! Do I have his mask? No. Can I get his mask... Yes. Can I buy it *legally*? Errr... I know this'll sound odd, because you know, I'm *ahem* borrowing the characters to play with them right and left, but... For whatever reason buying a prop of his mask to use in my renders feels like too much of a copyright violation. 
> 
> Probably because I've been happily off slowly modifying the characters and making them, and their world, my own since Tension/Balance chapter one. So, by this point, Kylo and Rey, and the rest of 'em, they're mine. But, the mask... That's Disney's.
> 
> Anyway, that's why we don't have any combat scenes or images where Kylo should have his mask. It's a thing I could do, and one day I may change my mind, but, for now, no mask.
> 
> ***************************
> 
> I got a comment on this chapter, that I think was worth discussing further, but I didn't want to wait until my next update, so...
> 
> Blog post time: https://kerylraist.wordpress.com/2018/08/05/endgame-balance-dark-and-light/ That's got my current musings on what I think I'm doing with this story.


	45. A World Without Black or White

11/2/1

 

The first time Rey watches it, she’s alone. Morning on Qualee Prime, Untrrch is still the cool dark hours of just past midnight for Lirium.

It’s true that since Rose put up the antenna array they’ve got a fairly wide range of information and entertainment available, but it’s also true that in general they don’t spend too much time watching current events.

It’s, for most of them, just easier to stay here, now. Orlac’s avoidance of political entanglements makes more and more sense to Rey as each day passes.

Finn and Chewie probably keep up the closest with the news, because knowing what’s going on around the galaxy makes it easier for them to pick the right cargo and get it to the right place. One planet’s drought is a water trader’s gold mine and the like.

But, for most of them, it’s a communication device, and a way to get something fun to watch or read in the evenings.

Today though… There are news channels, and there’s even one run by the Order that does nothing but broadcast information by, for, and about what they’re up to. She figures that if Kylo’s morning will be anywhere, it’ll be there.

And it is.

She knows when it’s going to happen and to the degree that she knows the name of the planet and city, she knows where.

She’s seen him fight before, she’s been by his side when he’s killed in battle. She knelt before him as he assassinated a Supreme Leader, and she’s asked him to make sure when he killed a man that it hurt.

But she’s never watched him execute someone. Never seen him go at it cold and calm. Never watched his blade move as… justice? Revenge?

Leaders kill people. No planet, no country, no system, no matter how humanely run, has had a history so peaceful that its leader didn’t end up killing others.

Though she knows, through her reading and Threepio’s history lessons, that normally there’s a good length of distance between said leader and the death he commands. For Kylo, that distance appears to be a bit shy of a meter of glowing red.

She watches.

Kylo Ren, Master of the Order, in his combat blacks drags, with the Force, a woman to kneel before him.

She’s tiny. Though it’s possible she’s normal-sized for a human woman, but he’s big for a human male, so kneeling before him, she’s tiny. Her head, staring straight ahead, is just above his knee level.

“Look at me.”

She raises her eyes to him.

“You are General L-en K’Rias, sister of the head of the K’Rias family, leader of a twenty-three family strong coalition among the ruling families of the Qualeen.”

She nods.

He stares down at her, waiting.

“Yes.”

“You gave the order to attack my recruiting stations?” Whatever camera is filming this is staying close on them, keeping everything around them in soft, blurred focus. Rey knows the fluttering black behind them is Kylo’s Order symbols, though, caught in whatever breeze there is around them.

“Yes.”

“Of your own volition, on the orders of no one else?”

“It was my decision, and mine alone.”

“One hundred and seventy-three of my people were killed in my stations because of that order. Another three hundred and eleven were injured. Ninety-six died, and four hundred and ninety-two of them were injured in securing and evacuating my people from the stations you attacked. Why did you call the strike on my stations?”

Even on her knees, less than a moment from her death, she’s smiling. “Because I knew you’d hit back.”

He nods. “Indeed.” And in one fast move he lights his saber and takes her head off.

 

 

When her corpse slumps to the side, he looks out to the crowd for the first time. “First, last, and only warning. The Order protects its own, and if we fail, we avenge them.” He looks to the cameras that are recording this, broadcasting to the rest of the galaxy. “Don’t try it again. I will not start a fight with any of you. If you start a fight with me, I will _end_ it and you.”

Then he extinguishes his blade and leaves the podium.

 

 

* * *

Dark and Evil… She’s certainly talked about it. Certainly thought about it.

She wonders if she should feel… revulsion… disgust… something at seeing Kylo decapitate a person. She doesn’t. Maybe she should, but she doesn’t. At least, not this person.

It’s when the broadcast flips, moves to the next bit, footage of what used to be cities, and are now kilometer deep smoldering wastelands that something clutches in her guts. K’Rias deserved what she got. She’s significantly less sure that those cities deserved what they got.

 _You’ll do what you do, and I’ll abide or not as I can…_ She remembers saying that to him.

 _Can you abide this?_ She’s not sure if she’s asking herself, or if that’s a shadow of his voice.

She can. She feels that through her. It makes her uncomfortable. She’s not sure it was the _right_ decision. Worse, she doesn’t know what the _right_ decision may have been. That’s where most of the uncomfortable is coming from. She has no idea what the _right_ thing to do is. He got the people out; that’s _right._ She can feel that. Knows that in her guts. If they wanted to go, he got them out or gave them time to go.

Compared to that, the rest of this is just… things.

But things matter to people. And…

And if he’d let the cities stand… would he take more attacks? Did this save lives in the long run? And… what did K’Rias mean about hitting back? Why _choose_ to attack someone who would level you?

He asked her to watch. Asked that if she would fight by his side, that she be there for things like this. She doesn’t know what she would have _done_ up there. He seemed more than enough on his own.

 

 

She feels him behind her. For a moment, he leans against the door to their bedroom, tired wafting off of him, watching her watch the newsfeed. “Am I still welcome here?” There’s nervousness in his eyes. Now that he’s cold, that the battle rage is drained out of him, he’s worried he’s gone beyond what she can condone.

She turns to him. “Why would you not be?” He slumps a little at that, a lot of nervous bleeding off of him.

He settles next to her in the chair, groaning a little. She shakes her head, standing up, tucking the datapad away. “Come on, let’s get you of out this and see what’s underneath.”

He’s not exactly looking like he wants to get up, but he’s been in his armor for more than a day and a half now, and he’s likely more of a mess than he wants to be under it.

It’s barely a dozen steps to her refresher. He’s quiet, tired, angry, achy.

Peeling the armor off, achy makes a lot of sense. His face, the only bit of his skin she’s seen since yesterday, is fine. The mask made sure nothing got him there. The rest of him, though… There are some cuts, tears, and dents in the plates of his armor, but underneath he’s in one piece, skin unbroken. _Bruised,_ he’s got black, blue, purple, screaming red, and mottled yellow-greens from where some of the hits only glanced against him, covering him from neck to foot, but no cuts, no burns, no broken bones.

“It didn’t hurt while I was doing it,” he says.

“I suppose that’s something,” she lightly traces her hands over his skin, before shrugging out of her robe, and turning the water on in the shower. It’s cooler than she’d like, and warmer than his skin needs, but for right now, for rinsing off sweat and anger, it’ll do. “Come on,” she gently tugs him into the shower, and just as gently washes him off. Her touch isn’t exactly perfunctory, but she’s mostly just getting him clean. Whatever comes next, will come _next._

 

 

He leans against her in the shower, his head on her shoulder, his weight balanced between the wall and her body. She can feel he’s crashing from the adrenaline rush of the last two days. Not enough rest or… “When did you eat last?”

He shakes his head, no idea.

Food, he needs food, and there’s something else in there, something he doesn’t want to touch, yet.

She pokes it anyway, feeling like it needs to be poked, like it’s a festering boil, and the only way it’s going to heal is to lance it and let the poisons out. “Tell me.”

“I found out, a bit before I took General K’Rias’s head, that the Ruling Oligarchs of the Qualeen System was a council of one hundred and twenty-six families. To join, a family needs a net worth of five billion credits. Within the Oligarchs, there are four main factions, each with around thirty members. K’Rias’s brother An-Dra, is the head of the smallest faction. They are primarily rural, dealing mostly in mining, farming, and _construction_.”

Rey winces, seeing where this is going.

“I just liquidated the net wealth of eighty-seven of the ruling families, and made K’Rias’s faction the most powerful remaining one. They now control the Council of Oligarchs, and because they control every major construction company left in the system, they’ll be solidifying their control for the next millennia.”

She feels him slump further into her.

“I do not have the manpower or resources to hold the system, so I can’t _fix_ this.”

She strokes the back of her neck.

“And I’ve just shown the entire galaxy that I can be manipulated into a weapon against any political faction, assuming the people who use me are motivated enough to die for it.”

She holds him close, and pets his shoulders. “Oh, love…”

They stay like that, holding each other in the shower, for a few long moments. Eventually, Rey says, “What happens now?”

“My lawyers and theirs are fussing about over terms.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Destroying the cities wasn’t enough?”

“No. Kinear had an idea to try and… mitigate the damage. We’re stripping the K’Rias and their coalition of enough credits and property they won’t qualify for the Oligarchy, either. So… maybe they change their laws, or maybe they fall into civil war, or maybe the handful of remaining Oligarchs take over everything. I don’t know.”

“Will it help?”

“Enough.” He’s flat, listless right now, about to drop.

“Okay, enough of this for now. Sleep, eat, sleep some more.” She turns off the water, dries him off, and tucks him into their bed.

There are two hours until she needs to be up and teaching. She lays next to him, stroking his skin, letting her Force gently mend bruises, and hopefully soothe a roiled mind.

 

 

* * *

The second time she watches it, it’s with the oldest of her students.

This time they watch footage from several sources, and some footage of the fight.

 

 

At the end of the fight, the evacs, the destruction of the cities, and Kylo decapitating the General, she says to Critt, Jacen, Elias, Savarah, and Magiit, “We talk about dark and evil. We talk about figuring out where the line is and what we need to do.” She looks at the now blank screen. “So, talk to me. What was that?”

Jacen speaks first. “Dark. Flat out dark. He did exactly what he had to do.” Rey’s not even remotely surprised by this. Jacen’s fond of Kylo, looks up to him, and, because he actually knows who Kylo is, and what Kylo’s Recruiting Stations have personally done for him, he’s _beyond_ protective of this whole idea. He could have been one of the people inside that station, and the idea that the _Master_ would personally come to save him is thrilling through Jacen.

Critt’s just staring at where the video was. That red blade is the nightmare of his childhood. The Jedi Killer was the reason his family moved around so often after it became clear that he had Force powers. It was the reason why he always had to keep himself under control, because when he got upset sometimes _things_ would happen around him, and… Anytime he did _something_ they had to move, so the Jedi Killer couldn’t find them. He’s too scared to say or think much of anything right now.

Savarah just watches. She’s not very talky even under the best of circumstances, and this isn’t the best of circumstances. She likes a good long time to think about things before saying anything. Rey knows, eventually, privately, she’ll have and opinion and talk to her about it, but it won’t be today. Today, she’ll think.

Rey’s got a feeling, that if there are ever sacred books of the Maji, Savarah will have been the person to write them, because she’s the one who sits down and really _thinks_ about all of this before talking about it.

Magiit grew up in Canto Bight, where the rich and mighty got to be that way by supplying weapons to the First Order. Yes, those recruiting stations were a way out, one they were desperate enough, even though they were all Resistance supporters, to flee to, though Poe found them, and got them out, first.  “Not sure about that, Jacen. Killing the General, sure. That’s… dark, but… justice? Probably. But the cities…”

“He got the people out of the cities…” Elias says. He grew up, more or less, as much as anyone could be, outside of the First Order/Resistance fight. At least, the little station where he and his lived traded with anyone who came through, but they were far enough off the beaten path that didn’t involve much in the way of Resistance or First Order people.

Jacen takes that as a point in his favor. “See, dark. The evil man kills everyone. He just taught them a lesson hard enough to make it stick.”

Critt’s still looking at the video, seeing… A million moves. Stuffing things into a ship, fast, ripped away from friends, starting over again, and again, and again. He quietly says, “You can’t get everyone out in seventeen hours. We were ready. Did it over and over, always ready to run, but it still takes time. Grabbing everything, figuring out what you need, getting _out._ It’s slow on the ground, and… He didn’t get all of the people out. Maybe a lot of them. Maybe most, but not all.”

“But he had to do it,” Jacen says.

“No.” That’s pretty much the only thing Rey thinks they absolutely need to know about this, all of it. “He didn’t. No one _had_ to do any of this. They’re all choices. This may have been his best option. Or not. We’ll never actually know that.”

“So, you’re saying this may have been a bad decision?” Magiit asks.

“I don’t know. If the rest of the galaxy looks at this and leaves those recruiting stations alone… It’s a good decision for him. If Critt is right and not everyone got out… It was a bad decision for them. If other systems use this as a way to make the Order take out other political powers they don’t like…”

The kids are all looking at each other, and Rey, and back to the blank holovid player.

Rey looks at them, and says, “According to Luke, the first time he met Obi Wan Kenobi, he told Luke that Darth Vader had betrayed and murdered his father. Later Luke learned that Anakin Skywalker had become Darth Vader. When he talked to Kenobi about it, Kenobi said the story he told Luke the first time had been true, from a certain point of view.” She can feel Kylo sleeping still, in their bed, about eight hundred meters away from her. “I think we can all agree that was dark. We may never agree about evil, because we may never have similar enough points of view to agree on it.”

“The lady who gave that order in the first place, that was evil,” Jacen says.

Rey half smiles at that. “I don’t disagree.” She eyes the rest of the kids, and none of them challenge that. “Though, I’m fairly sure, that if you were to bring this up with the Kennas, or the Ticos, they may tell you that any attack against Ren is warranted. That he’s done so much bad stuff in his life that any and everyone who wishes to attack him is justified…”

She lets that dangle.

Jacen either picked what she wanted out of her head, or is far enough in his own judgement that he can make the argument himself. “Fuck that! Sorry, Rey.” The official rule is to not curse in front of the grown-ups. What they say on their own is up to them. And all of the adults are more than aware that everyone on the planet over the age of twelve has an _interesting_ vocabulary. Which is why they’ve got said rule in the first place, because there’s only so many variation on the theme of fuck coming out of the mouths of adolescents that they want to hear. “But _fuck that_. They didn’t fly up to the _Supremacy_ to hit Ren, they went against his recruiting stations, and if it’s anything like the station I went to, it never hurt anyone. Look, if they’d blown up a training facility, I’d have a lot less to say about that, because some of those fuckers were sociopaths, but the recruiting stations… No one ever got hurt there.

“That’s like… attacking the enemy’s medical cruiser. Just… wrong.” Jacen pauses to think for a moment. “Okay, you want to make the argument that Ren deserves what he gets… well, I may understand it, don’t like it, but if we’re saying those cities didn’t deserve what they got, then just being near Ren can’t mean you deserve whatever he does. If those cities weren’t responsible for what their General did, then the new recruit sitting in one of his stations isn’t responsible for his past.”

Critt snorts at him. “Being near Ren makes you dead. That’s what the Jedi Killer _does._ If he knew about us here… We’d be so fucked.” And that’s part two of why they aren’t allowed, generally, to curse in front of the adults, once one of them does, all of them follow. “Why do you think Padme gets guys like you out of the Order? So Ren can’t kill you!”

Jacen looks at Rey, rubbing his lips together, hard, and she thinks at him, _no._

He looks annoyed by that, and she just knows, in her bones and guts that he _won’t_ keep the secret. Not with Critt. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but…

“And look, I know what the Order did for you, Jacen,” Critt continues, “but… The man is _evil._ And if someone wants to—“

Jacen cuts in. “Make sure people like me have no way to get away! That’s what burning his recruiting stations is about. It’s not about Ren. Luke Skywalker could have been running those stations, and they’d have hit them. You saw that, too, right Magiit? Slavers doing everything they could to keep people like us from getting away.”

She nods. “That’s why all of us came. We needed all eight of us to get through the city. If Poe had just taken Marrok, we’d have been… Still there probably. They had slave catchers all over the city after those stations went up. You could barely set foot on the street without getting your papers checked.” She rolls her eyes. “The only reason they didn’t raze the stations was that they made too much money off the First Order. If anyone else had been running them, they would have leveled them.”

Elias has been thinking, fiddling a bit with his Maji pendent. “It’s about balance, right? That’s what you told us, Rey. He did all of that bad shit before, killing people left and right, fighting for Snoke, and now, he’s not. Now…” he looks to Jacen, “You’re here because of him, and so are a few of the rest of us.”

“They’re here because of Padme,” Critt adds.

“Padme couldn’t have gotten me if I hadn’t gotten to a recruiting station, first. _Padme_ isn’t scouring the galaxy looking for orphan slaves to help. That’s _Ren,_ ” Jacen says, Force thrumming through his voice.

Rey eyes him and shoots him a quick, _Stop it._

He thinks back to her, _I’m trying. It’s hard._

 _I know._ “Anyway, I wanted you to see, and to think about it. You don’t have to agree on what happened or how you think about it. You do have to feel it, and understand what and why you’re feeling it. It’s about time for you to be getting to lessons with Threepio.” The kids know it’s time to break the conversation, and start getting up. “Jacen, stick around for a moment, okay?”

The others leave them, watching Jacen with Rey.

Once they’re out he says to her, genuinely, “I’m sorry. I just…”

“Look, I _understand_.”

He half smiles at her, frustrated. “Yeah, you do.”

“That said, _don’t_ use your voice on them when we’re talking about this, and when you tell Critt, and _no_ that is _not_ me giving you permission, I just know you’re going to do it, make sure he doesn’t spread it around.”

“Are you giving me permission to use my voice, then?” Jacen looks much too amused by that idea.

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t have to, but… You ever see that huge scar on Finn’s back?”

He nods. He’s got his own marks on his back, the slavers on his planet liked to make sure no one would ever mistake him for a freeman, and one day Finn was commiserating with him, and showed him the big one on his.

“You want to guess who put it there?”

Jacen winces. “Is everyone he managed to not succeed in killing here?”

Rey sighs, uncomfortably aware that Jacen might be right about that. “There are reasons why he’s Padme here. And… I hope, eventually, he won’t have to be, but there’s still a lot of raw feelings about him, so… Keep the secret.”

“Sure. It’s just…” There’s this huge wave of indignant adolescent frustration sloshing all through Jacen. His _hero_ , which is likely the most fitting term to cover what Kylo is to him, is hated by people he rather likes, and it aches.

“ _I know,_ Jacen, _I really do._ ”

“Yeah, I guess you would, Lady Ren.”

 

 

* * *

She returns to her cottage, and can feel him still sleeping in their bed.

She makes lunch and debates waking him up. Tired Kylo’s not exactly a right little bowl of sunshine and porgs, tired, hungry Kylo’s somewhere between a Rancor and a Rathnor. Neither of which is a good thing. Tired, hungry, _doubtful_ Kylo, because she can feel, even in his sleep, that her darkling is spiraling into a lot of _shit, I just fucked everything sideways_ is likely something she hasn’t seen since he was holding out his hand to her in Snoke’s throne room as everything around them burned.  

And then she knows she’s waking him up. He rarely sleeps for more than six or seven hours at a time, so, even getting a longer sleep than normal, making up for everything yesterday and the day before, he’ll still wake up in their bed, alone.

Not today.

She slips into their room, and lays on the bed next to him. He’s on his back, spread out, aware, enough, that it’s her, that he hasn’t gone springing up in a panic. She snuggles in next to his chest, and pets his face gently. “Hey, wake up… I’ve got food.”

His eyes don’t open, though he makes a little “Mmmm…” sound. He shares the sensation of his limbs each a thousand kilos and his body so comfortable he just _can’t_ move.

She kisses him. “Okay, but remember this when you really wake up.”

“Mmmm…” His lips move enough for a half-hearted kiss back.

 

 

* * *

The third time she watches it, she’s in the microfarm. They’ve got the first of them set up, and right now, they’re planting.

Most of this one is ‘practical’ food.  Lots of nutrients, and a good long shelf-life. They’ve got, right now, shallow troughs for potatoes. But as they grow, they’ll add new layers to the trough, let the potatoes grow up, and maximize the yield through vertical space.

White potatoes, red potatoes, purple potatoes, sweet potatoes, taro, yams. Root veggies that do well with cool soil. One five meter long by one meter wide trough for each of them.

Rose, Finn, and a few of the kids are working on them.

The Kennas are building extra troughs. This microfarm will fit ten troughs.  So, six of “practical” food, and four for “fun” food. Rey’s got half a trough for her own goodies, and she’s working on it. 

Rey’s planting strawberries. She hasn’t mentioned this to Kylo. They’ll be a surprise. As she pokes little holes into the soft soil, dropping seeds, she’s happily imagining the dinner where he brings the meal from the _Supremacy_ and sees a bowl of strawberries on the table, waiting for him.

Poe comes running in, looking worried, “Rey!”

She jerks up from her planting.

“Did you—“ He sees the kids, Cassie among them. “Hey, uh… can I get some time with just the adults?”

None of the kids like that, but Poe so infrequently asks for alone time, and he’s generally so good about telling them ‘secrets’ that they shuffle out, wondering.

Once they’re out, he steps next to Rey, and Finn and Rose crowd in on the other side. Rafe and Millie join them. “What?”

“Is Padme… okay?” Poe asks, pulling out his datapad, showing them the footage of the fighting.

 

 

“Yes. I’ve… He’s in our cottage, resting, now.”

“Did he get hurt?” Finn asks.

“No.”

The Kennas are staring at the execution, the same, bone, gut, heart deep horror on their face that Critt had.

“He’s done with them, now, right?” Rafe asks, voice hard. “He wouldn’t stay after… that.”

“No. He can’t be done. Ren’s still there,” Finn says. “He’s not leaving until the job is done.”

Rey can feel Luke’s voice in her head. _You said Vader betrayed and murdered my father!_ And Luke’s version of Obi Wan: _From a certain point of view._ She supposes that the vaguely amused idea in the back of her head, _You said Padme betrayed and murdered Kylo Ren…_ is irony. _Padme saved and redeemed Kylo Ren…_ No. She knows that. Padme/Kylo they’re _one._ She thinks of Vader/Anakin and Ben/Kylo/Padme, but the only real insight she takes from it is that the Jedi became so wrapped up in the idea of inviolate light and dark that they couldn’t accept that the _same person_ could be both.

“Did you not see that! The job can’t be done! He was just—“ Millie’s voice stops as the saber falls on General K’Rias’s neck.

“An entire army couldn’t take Ren out. Why would Padme think he can?” Rafe adds. “You need to get him out of there. If Ren ever finds him, he’ll lead him right to us, and… Then it’ll be us…”

Rey sighs. “Trust in the Force. We’re in no danger from Kylo Ren, not here.”

“We’re in danger from Kylo Ren no matter where we are,” Rafe says.

Rey shakes her head, and feels that Poe and Rose are watching the holovid differently than the rest of them.

“How many?” Rose asks.

Poe shakes his head. “Not enough. He evacuated the cities and only attacked them after his own people were attacked. The only recruits I could get from something like this are the same ones I could have gotten yesterday.”

“Really?” Rose doesn’t want to hear that.

“Yeah,” Poe doesn’t want to say it, but wanting or not, it's true. “There’s not a major player in the galaxy that will back me if I go up against him for defending his own people. None of them want the precedent in place that _that’s_ a legitimate cause for attack.”

“But it’s Kylo Ren!” Finn says, watching the video.

“Trust me, I _know_ ,” Poe replies. “I can likely get more individuals. Maybe some credits and a few dozen more ships, maybe even pilots for them, on the off chance that Ren may go further over the line. But I won’t be able to get any real support, and…” he shakes his head. “ _Leia,_ who had more tactical sense, better connections, and the fucking Force on her side, couldn’t win a war against the Order with two hundred people and a few dozen ships. But I'm not Leia, and I’m done getting people killed in hopeless gestures.”

“There’s got to be something…” Rose says.

Poe looks over his shoulder, through the transteel of the microfarm walls, to the town they’ve been building. The town Rose has put so much energy into. “I’ll take up the slack in here if you want to fly around all over hell and gone looking for someone to give me a fleet.”

Rose snorts an annoyed sound.

“If she got one, would you use it?” Rey asks, curious.

Poe sighs. “Moot point really. There’s no fleet with my name on it.”

“Yeah, but…” Rey leads. She can feel the Kennas hoping the answer is yes. She can feel Rose and Finn ready to sign back up and get into the fight.

But she doesn’t feel that from Poe.

He swallows, hard. “Leia said she was fine being a rebel, but she wouldn’t be a terrorist. Every system in the galaxy holds that self-defense against attackers is permissible. There’s _nowhere_ that’s against the rules of war. _That’s_ why we weren’t _terrorists,_ but _rebels._ Supposedly, we were rebelling against the idea that you could just attack people willy-nilly, or because it made things better for you. That being a conqueror wasn't, ever, justified. I spent twenty years doing it, so… If that meant anything to me, beyond excitement and a sexy TIE fighter, then…”

“We’re not talking about attacking some little innocent bystander, Poe. It’s Kylo Ren!” Finn says, voice hot.

“Look, I do not like the guy, but… From everything I can see, since he’s been in charge, he’s been playing by the rules.” He sighs. Unlike Finn and Rose, he’s old enough to remember the New Republic. Hell, he’d been Captain Dameron of the New Republic before he left it, with Leia, for the Resistance. So, he knows what the game was, and if there’s a difference between what Ren’s doing now and they were doing, as the New Republic, he can’t spot it. He no longer wears the mark of the Resistance, and that’s part of why, but he knows Rose still has one in her ring. He taps her ring, gently, and says, “If that mattered, then… It mattered, right?”

Rose looks like she wants to spit. She can’t let herself disagree with Poe, because she doesn’t like the idea of who she’ll be if she disagrees with Poe, but she’s still too angry with the First Order to divorce it from the Order.

Rey can feel it. Poe joined the Resistance for a cause, for his hero, Leia. Rose joined it for her ghosts.

Rey’s not wearing the token right now. It’s still with Kylo, where it probably needs to be, but she wants to touch it. She remembers telling the Kennas that what they’re doing here is for everyone. That the Force isn’t about our team being good and their team being bad and…

“Poe’s got it. The rules… whatever they are… apply to everyone. That’s got to be part of it, or it won’t balance.”

“I think Ren gets to be an exception. He _broke_ all the rules,” Finn says, and Rafe’s quietly cheering him on.

Poe looks tired, and sighs at that. “So did I.” He doesn’t elaborate, but Rey can feel him thinking of it, feel the memory of it, and… She hadn’t known that about him, and she’s got the sense that Rose and Finn don’t, either.

He’d been ordered to break off the attack on the _Fulminatrix_ , and he didn’t follow those orders. He went in, took his fleet with him, and got two thirds of them killed _violating_ a direct order to retreat. Poe’s comment about being done getting people killed makes a _lot_ more sense to Rey now.

She catches his eye as she says, “We don’t live in the past, or the future, just now. So… forgive the past, hope for the future, and only hold people accountable for their now,” She figures that’s as good as she’s going to get on this. He nods at her, and she can see he understands that she already knows what he’s feeling the need to confess.

Poe says, quietly, “Rose, Finn, would you get a walk with me?”

Rey knows that Poe’s going to tell them about what he did with the _Fulminatrix._

“I’ve got this,” she adds, nodding to the rows of troughs that aren’t getting any more planted. “Go.”

When they leave, Rafe says, “What was that about?”

The walls of the microfarms are transsteel. The same sort they made the chapel dome, and the windows of starships with. They’re perfectly clear, so it’s not like they can’t see the three of them, about fifteen meters away. They can’t hear, but they see Rose slap Poe’s face and start to cry. Finn looks startled, and very hurt, as he wraps his arms around Rose.

“Not everyone has a pristine past of excellent decision making.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, apparently, I have *opinions* about Poe Dameron, and the way fandom has been treating him since The Last Jedi. I also, apparently, have opinions about derailing the thrust of my story and distracting from the main content. So, instead of a long, ranty note at the end, I'll just post a link.
> 
> https://kerylraist.wordpress.com/2018/08/07/in-defense-of-poe-dameron/
> 
> If you're interested in seeing me break down why, exactly, Poe hate is utterly unwarranted, go have a read. It'll likely be amusing.


	46. The Galaxy Without White Or Black

11/2/1

 

Kylo wakes up feeling out of sorts.

Tired, hungry, upside down, alone…

His eyes finally open, and he is alone, which is disappointing, but he sort of remembers… He smiles a little, and sighs. If he’d been willing to actually wake up earlier, he wouldn’t have woken alone. And, even now, there’s a bowl of soup on the table next to the bed.

He wraps the blanket around him, takes the bowl, and goes to the kitchen, putting the bowl on the table. It’s not like their bed is a stranger to occasional drips and splashes of various fluids, but vegetable soup isn’t one he wants on his sheets. Plus, he knows a cup of coffee will be the difference between feeling out of sorts and at least vaguely functional.

When he reaches out for the container of beans, getting his morning cup of coffee going, his arm slips from the blankets, and he can see the lack of bruises.

_Been practicing your healing?_

_You’re awake!_

_That’s debatable._

Apparently she’s got a sense of him and what he’s doing. (Standing by the counter looking at the coffee maker.) _At least until you’ve had some coffee._

He smiles at that. _I’m upright working on feeding myself. You?_

_Lessons. Threepio’s going over the battle of H’Radnor._

He knows she enjoys the history lessons, and the tactical planning, and political negotiating that Threepio’s teaching. So, he’s not going to pull her away from that. Though he will ask about it later, learn it second-hand. (Or argue with it. He and Threepio tend to agree about ancient history, which H’Radnor is, but anything from the last sixty or so years, they have _drastically_ different interpretations of.)

 

__

 

 _Okay._ He sits at the table with his cup of coffee and bowl of soup. For a moment, he’s just there, enjoying not having to rush. For a moment. Then everything else in the world comes back to him. _I’m going to eat and get back to the Supremacy. See what’s blown up in the last twelve hours._

_Nothing that’s making the news._

_You’re watching?_

_We are._

_Oh…_ He knows how often they watch the news here, and is feeling a sense of trepidation. If they’re all watching it… Probably means things are worse than he was thinking/hoping. _Who’s we?_

_Most everyone over the age of fourteen._

_Lovely._ Time to get on fixing this. As much as it can be. _Talk later?_

_Later._

* * *

“You’re back!” Kinear sounds exasperated at him, but Kylo can feel that’s his own exhaustion creeping through the wall of professionalism he normally keeps drawn around him.

“I am. And you are relieved for at least the next two days, and three is better. Go, rest, eat. See your wife. Talk with her about this, and come back to me with ideas.”

Kinear smirks. “You’ve decided she’s the half of us with the brains.”

Kylo almost smirks. “I’d never be so crass as to say that out loud.”

“Of course not, _Master_.” Kinear turns away from the viewport to look toward the ship. Right now he’s just got a view of the wall of Kylo’s office, but Kylo understands the gesture. “Can you feel it?”

Kylo nods. He can. The thrum of it through the ship. The devotion. The awe. The willingness to fight and die for him, because he’ll fight and die for them. His troops feel valued and important and triumphant right now, and it’s buzzing through the ship.

 

 

He turns back to Kylo, scowling, genuinely upset. “If it weren’t for that, I’d take you over my knee and spank you for that stunt. I don’t care you’re three times my size, you don’t--”

Kylo raises an eyebrow.

Frustration is pouring off of Kinear. “You’re of no use to any of us _dead._ ”

“I do not appear to be dead.”

“ _This time_. We have invested a lot of time, energy, money, and _lives_ in getting you to a place where you can rule this fucking empire. Do _not_ throw it away!”

“Kinear, If I’m not the man who will rescue them, I’m not worth your time, energy, money, or lives.”

Kinear grits his teeth, and Kylo can feel _that’s_ why he’s frustrated. He knows shows like this are valuable, but he hates having to watch them. Kylo smiles, almost, he can feel that Kinear is starting to genuinely like _him_ as well as what he can do for him. “I know that. It doesn’t make it any easier to watch.” He nods to the bundle of black under Kylo’s arm, and the Padme clothing on his skin. “I take it the armor is good.”

“Very.”

“Excellent. Perhaps next time you don’t have to march in the front line?”

“Again. If I’m not there, I’m not worth the support.”

Kinear’s eyes narrow. “That’s how empires fall, _Master_ Ren.”

“And it’s how they’re born. The Force protects my body. Hopefully you’re protecting my holdings.” There’s enough edge in his voice that Kinear knows to shift the subject, a bit.

“I am. Our lawyers have been working overtime, getting a plan set.” He nods to the datapad on Kylo’s desk.

“Has D’Vrys seen this?”

“Yes, and she’s less than thrilled by it.”

Kylo shrugs. “Go. Rest. I’m here, now.”

Kinear nods, slumping a bit with tiredness. “I know.” His voice is softer as he says, “Don’t scare me again like that. I saw that bolt coming right at you and…”

“It stopped, didn’t it?”

“Yes, but I didn’t know you could do that.”

Kylo does smirk this time. “I’m full of interesting surprises.”

Kinear rolls his eyes, mutters something about how nice it would be if one of those surprises was not giving old men heart attacks, and then shaking his head, leaves.

 

 

* * *

Kylo reads through the documents, nodding. They look fine to him. Well, they look good enough to him.

Rested, fed, the Maji token against his throat, back in his command blacks, he’s feeling… better. A bit more settled. A little less like he’s fucked everything sideways. Maybe fucked it all forwards or something. He smirks at that, but feels that the hopelessness clinging to him yesterday is receding.

At least some.

 

 

* * *

D’Vrys is not pleased with him.

She’s also not being calm or holding her emotions in check.

“This is impossible!” she says, slamming the datapad with his terms down on his desk. “I cannot take this deal to them!”

He shrugs. “You have a ship and free passage. I’ve left you with fifty-percent of your personal holdings. That’s more than enough to start over in luxury in any number of the rim worlds. You don’t have to take this deal anywhere.”

“You know what I mean,” she bites out.

He nods to the chair in front of his desk. “I do. Sit. Would you like a drink or food or something…”

She glares.

He shrugs. “I’m not used to doing this.”

“That’s _abundantly_ clear.” She shakes her head, looking at the pad. “Corporate punishment is archaic. The attacks on your holdings were not sanctioned by our Council of Oligarchs. Holding all of us responsible for the actions of a rogue general is an abomination.”

He shrugs again, getting himself a cup of coffee. “I don’t disagree.” He nods to the cup in his hand, and she shakes her head again.

“Then…” It’s clear she’s thinking that if he doesn’t much want to do this, why is he?

“I also can’t get around it. Not this time. I’d prefer to only punish those who have wronged me.”

“Say that to the at least 170,000 missing and assumed dead Qualee.”

“I told them to get out. I offered them transport.”

“You blew up entire cities to—“

“Stop.” He puts some command into his voice, and she stops. He puts the cup on his desk. “I did not start this. If you’d left me in peace, everyone would be fine.”

“I was going to—“

“I don’t care!” He’s standing now, leaning against the edge of his desk, towering over here. “You and yours though playing with fire was fun, and you got burned. If it were just up to me, I’d have decapitated your General and been done with that. But it’s not just me and her. She attacked my people. And if I don’t go hard on her and you, everyone else who doesn’t want to deal with the ‘inappropriate ideas’ my stations are spreading will gently, subtly suggest to someone that it might be in the best interests of their survivors to go on a suicide mission against me.”

 

 

She slumps, head in hand for a moment, before looking up and saying, “And that’s why you’re going against the families who had nothing to do with this attack?”

“No. I’m going against them because if I don’t, any other bright politician like K’Rias will notice that if they’re willing to die for it, they can use me to take their opponents out of the mix. Your General didn’t care in the slightest about the people I was draining out of your society, or the ones I was going to put back.”

“I know.” It’s rough and grudging in her voice.

“So, what, you hoped I didn’t? Yes, I can read minds, and I could see her imagining her brother ruling the whole damn system now that he’s the richest man left in place. I _can’t_ let that stand. If I do, they’ll use me like a hired gun.”

“You’ve destroyed us.”

Kylo scoffs at that. “You’ve got your people, you’ve got your mines, and you’ve got more than 200 cities left. The only thing I am completely dismantling is your armed forces. This is not scorched-earth warfare. Compared to what Snoke would have done to you, this is barely a reprimand.”

“Seventeen cities, gone, and the credits you’re demanding are not insignificant.”

“Neither are the protections I’m offering. You’ll be able to rebuild as well as you can, unmolested.”

She shakes her head. “Rebuild.”

“Rebuild. You may not have the power base you’d like, but you should have more than enough credits left to start construction on new cities and businesses, or to expand your existing cities.”

“And you’ll be more than happy to offer loans and good prices on materials if we buy them from your colonies.”

He smiles, a little. “They aren’t _my_ colonies. I don’t have colonies. I have people and ships. And I have relationships with newly independent or in the process of becoming independent worlds, who have agreed to exchange goods and credits for the protections I offer.” He taps the pad. “I’m taking your credits and holdings. Rights of war. I’ve won after an unprovoked attack. I get to _take._ You can take me up on my protection and loans or not as you see fit. But, if you don’t take me up on my protections, you’ll be economically devastated and naked to anyone who wishes to take you. And I have a feeling anyone else interested in you is going to be significantly less gentle than I am.”

That also gets a glare, but she opens the document on her pad, and presses her thumb to it, along with allowing the camera to scan her eye.

“We’re taking it. For now.”

“It’s a five year term. You are in no way required or expected to go along with any longer than that.”

“Good.”

 

 

* * *

He spends two hours going through the reports, finding how his troops preformed, how his fleet did in getting into position, how many ships he’s lost, (and how many he’s gained. The top of the list of things he’s taking is every ship left in the Qualeen fleet. Schiff will likely appreciate that.) how many people he’s lost. He had a count when he took K’Rias’s head, but it’s been an additional fourteen hours, and wounded troops die slowly.

Not too many more. That pleases him.

The fact that, compared to the First Order’s usual casualty numbers, he got out of this completely unscathed makes him happier.

“C8, send for Jon, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

 

* * *

He’s finishing up a conversation with Vice Admiral Ulan, the person who is in charge of the bit of the galaxy the Qualeen system is in, going over how many ships they want in the Qualeen system (basically, all of the ships he’s taking from the Qualee, plus a few hundred more), who is going to run the operation (currently unknown, but there’s a short list of five potential ‘Governors’), how quickly they can get this in place (not fast enough, but the skeleton can be in place in six weeks), and how many more people he’s going to need for this (Fewer than Kylo thought he’d need, and this does work well with his plans to get people off the _Supremacy._ ) when Jon comes to him.

He waits patiently, not sure if he’s supposed to be listening to this conversation, but Kylo didn’t keep him waiting in the throne room, so… it’s probably okay to listen.

 _Can’t properly do diplomatic things if you don’t know what we’re up to, right?_ Kylo thinks to him while he’s finishing up the conversation with the holo of the Vice-Admiral shimmering above his desk.

Jon nods.

Once Ulan has signed off, Kylo turns his full attention to Jon. “The armor was _extremely_ useful. We had 10% of the casualties of the last serious fight of the First Order. From everything I can see, your work personally saved about eighteen hundred lives.”

Jon smiles at that, feeling really good. “A good day of work, then.”

“Yes. And with any luck, I should have enough credits left over after this to pay to upgrade the rest of our armor.”

“Excellent. And your armor?”

“I’m still here.”

Jon just stares at him, and then says, “From what I saw, that would have been true if you’d gone in naked.”

“All of my limbs are still attached, I can breathe without assistance, and I’m not swimming in bacta right now, too.”

“And that may not have been true.” Jon looks Kylo over. Of course, like usual, he’s in his command blacks and the only parts of his body visible are above his laryngeal prominence. “What kind of damage did you take?”

“Bruises. A lot of them.”

“Should you be in bacta?”

Kylo smiles a little. “I’ve got something better at home.”

Jon smirks, misreading that comment to mean that Kylo got magnificently laid when he got home, and that had distracted him from the bruises. “You should still get looked at.”

Kylo gives him an amused look. “That’s not exactly what I meant by better. My…” he’s not sure what to say here: lady, woman, wife, love… He almost never talks about Rey, because that means talking about his private life, but… Jon knows she exists and… “Rey. Her name is Rey. She’s also a Force user.” He pulls off his left glove and pushes his sleeve up, not a bruise in sight. “She’s good at healing.”

 

 

Jon nods. “Literally better. Okay. Not that I’d want you hurting if you don’t have to, but if you’d left the bruises in place, I could have seen where your armor needs more work.”

Kylo inclines his head. That’s a very reasonable request. “Next time. And if you want access to the casualty reports…”

“I do. That’ll make it easier to see where the weak spots are on the storm trooper’s armor.”

“I’ll see you get it.”

“How damaged is your armor?”

“Some rips, tears, dents, and burns, one of the shin plates may be cracked, it was making a sort of clicking sound when we took it off, but it kept me in one piece, so it did everything I needed it to do.”

“Good.” Jon looks to Kylo’s room. “May I get it?”

Kylo remembers how Jon was more than a little squeamish about being stuck in a room with body parts, and his armor isn’t exactly clean or gore-free.

“Maybe let the laundry service have it first. It’s not in pretty condition, and smells worse.”

Jon appears to think that’s a relevant consideration and nods his head. “Okay, and I’ll make sure we get on a second suit for you. If something came up today, I wouldn’t want you waiting for repairs.”

“Thank you. How is the hunt for a design specialist as a replacement going?”

Jon rolls his eyes a little. “There are three very promising designers in your training corps now. I can get the first of them working for me in the next month.”

“But…”

“But promising design work doesn’t mean promising logistical work, or cost/benefits work, or sourcing goods work, or the ability to get a mass production line into the works.” There is a reason, beyond being the highest ranking designer to survive the Holdo attack, that Jon is in charge of Tactical Design, and that’s the fact that he’s not just a designer, but also the man who knows how to put a production line into place. He’s got designers right now, finding one who can take those images and make them real for a force of more than five million people is another story all together.

“Ah. So the hunt continues?”

“The hunt continues, though… Have you been out of your rooms?”

Kylo shakes his head. “No, why?”

“Even I can feel it out there. It’s… The _Supremacy_ has _never_ felt this way. I have a feeling this is going to work wonders for your recruiting. The Qualee who got calls from their family, telling them to evac, are thinking that joining someone who does things like that, who values not just his people, but their people as well, may be worth offering allegiance, as well.”

Kylo smiles at that. “Good.”

“And as those images spread across the galaxy… We may not offer the best pay, but I’m sure there’s a decent-sized population of mercenaries or guns for hire who would appreciate knowing that when push comes to shove, someone will push back, hard, for them.”

That pleases Kylo, too. He may not be in need of too many mercenaries, he’s got more ground troops than he knows what to do with, but he’s sure that if Jon’s right about that, there’ll also be _pilots_ who’ll appreciate having someone watching their back. Likely mechanics and logistical specialists and, who knows, maybe a diplomat or two. He’s nodding as he pushes a copy of the Qualee treaty to Jon. “Diplomacy 101. Here are our terms. Read. Think. Tell me what you think about them.”

“Okay.” For a moment, Jon is holding the pad, but not really reading it. “I do have one thought. Not exactly related to this, but…”

Kylo nods at him.

“We’re at almost a year of the Order, and… especially coming off a victory, now might be a good time to have some sort of celebration. The last time I checked, we’ve doubled our numbers since this time last year. It’ll probably be even more before we get to the New Year. You’ve gone a year now, formally in charge, without doing anything… off-putting,” Kylo thinks that’s a polite way to say he hasn’t murdered any bankers recently. “so it’s likely more people would be willing to come to this than did last year. And… I have a feeling, that some sort of formal, ‘welcome new citizens’ thing would be of value, too.” He taps the pad. “And if you wanted to expand on what you said a year ago, go more into what The Order is and does, this would be the time for it.”

All of that sounds reasonable. “Can you set it up in seven weeks?”

“Theoretically, as an officer, at my rank, I’m supposed to be able to plan and execute a full planetary invasion in a month. I should be able to handle an anniversary party, even a big one, in almost two months.”

“Then give me a party.”

“Yes, sir!”

 

 

* * *

“You look like you’re feeling better,” Rey says as Kylo comes through to their kitchen, with, fortunately, supper in hand.

She's already sitting at their table, looking flat and limp. “And you look exhausted.”

“One of us didn’t get an eight hour nap earlier today.”

He gently strokes the nape of her neck, kissing the top of her head, and putting the plate and bowl on the table. “Hungry?”

“Yes,” she inhales, deeply, hoping to figure out, by smell, what’s in front of her. “Okay, I’ve got no idea what this is.”

Kylo grabs spoons, forks, and knives for them. He sees she’s already got glasses of water waiting for them. “I know what it’s called, but that wasn’t helpful.”

“What’s it called?”

“The stew is a goulash, and the little things on the plate are pirogi.” He sets the utensils down, and then sits next to her. She lays her head on his shoulder for a moment, before grabbing a spoon, and taking a taste of the stew.

“Good?” he asks, cutting a pirogi in half with his fork. Apparently, it’s some sort of dumpling.

Rey thinks about it. “I’m not sure I’d want it regularly, but it’s okay for once and a while.” She nods to the pirogi, and he takes a bite.

“Soft, kind of bland, some sort of cheese in there.”

She spears one of them, snarfing it down. Today’s a good day for sort of bland and cheesy.

They don’t talk as they eat. She’s tired, doesn’t have much going on in her mind, and he’s fairly awake right now, but is fine with just being near her. He doesn’t have to let all the ideas out of his head right now. There’ll be tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after, or…

He kisses her again.

She flashes him a little curious look. She’s been far enough in her own head his thoughts weren’t bouncing around in there.

“Time. You and I have time.”

She gives him a little smile at that.

 

 

* * *

Time means the next morning.

It means both of them comfortably warm in the cave of blankets on their bed.

It means after slow gentle rocking has gone fast and erratic, punctuated with harsh breath and gasped words, and eased out again into a soft glow.

It means once their bodies relaxed, cuddled together, catching the slow brightening of the day.

Her head is on his chest, her fingers gently stroking just below his nipple, as she says, “Why did you want me to watch you take K’Rias’s head? Why up on the platform with you?”

He’s lightly stroking her hair. He doesn’t answer, not with his voice, but she can see that her there, by his side in a fight, her armor light, her staff with it’s red-haloed blue, watching his back as he watches hers… That’s all part of his image of Lord and Lady Ren. Maybe not anything that was in his vision, but it’s part of his feel for how it’s supposed to work.

He gently squeezes her hand and raises his head to kiss the top of hers.

When he does speak, he says, “I don’t want you to have any illusions about what I’m doing.”

“I don’t.”

“Good.” He’s quiet, mostly feeling her skin against his, her hair between his fingers. Mostly. “Do you ever want me here? Have some sort of vision of Master Kylo?”

“Often.”

“What would I do?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I have a very clear image of you teaching them how to write or use a lightsaber, or spending some real time with Critt. Jacen has a bit of a crush on you; he’d likely follow you around like a smartass puppy.”

“I probably don’t need to be encouraging that.”

“Not that sort of crush. He looks up to you.”

He smiles a little at that.

“The other Order kids would, too, if they knew it was you.”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment, and then replies with, “It’s not for my sake they don’t know who Padme is.”

“I know.” She makes a small sound, halfway between a laugh and a snort. “Finn and Rose just about choked when Poe told them that you hadn’t done anything wrong with that attack.”

“Your pilot said that?”

“Apparently, _Admiral_ Dameron, the former second-in-command of the Resistance, is at least vaguely aware of the rules of war.”

“And honest enough to apply them to me. I’m touched.” The hand stroking her hair goes still. “I take it the Ticos and Kennas were less honest?”

“I don’t think honest is part of it. Their histories with the First Order and,” her lips rub together, she’s never _said_ it before, but… It’s him, all of it is _him._ “The Jedi Killer, make it harder to be impartial.”

Kylo nods, exhaling a long sigh. “Twenty-two. The Knights and I killed twenty-two would-be Jedi. Did we… find the Kennas?”

“If you did, they aren’t talking about it, and they’ve got the memory buried so deep I can’t sense it. But they were scared enough to be constantly on the move, uprooting if anyone saw Critt do anything to give away his Force powers.”

“Wise parents. Snoke’s spies paid well for information about Force sensitives.” He thinks about their conversation about giving her time. It’s been… fourteen months maybe. Something like that. He knows it was before he created the Order. Poe’s apparently coming around, because, other than that one interrogation session where, really, compared to what he could have done, he didn’t go that hard on Poe, and he knows that Poe knows that, he’s never, personally, done anything to him.  The Ticos and Kennas though… “How long would it take you to forgive the person who murdered me?”

She blinks. “Kylo?”

“No good reason. Just evil and spite, tore your world to shreds, ripped your home and heart apart. How long?”

“Kylo.” She props herself up on her elbows looking at him, dismay on her face.

 

 

“Anyone who is capable of being reasonable about this, already is. Anyone who can forgive, has. And all the time in the world won’t help for the ones who can’t.”

“I don’t believe that.”

He sighs at that, stroking her cheek. _Light-sider._ “I know. Your light won’t let you. Given enough time all hates cool. You believe that. I can feel it.”

“And perhaps you see them never coming around because of your dark.”

“Perhaps.”

She kisses his chest. “Jacen’s going to tell Critt. I don’t know when, but he is. Critt’s terrified you’re coming to kill us all, and sure Padme’s getting the Order kids out to save them from Ren.”

Kylo sighs. “Are you going to stop him?”

“No. I’m… not brave enough to tell the ones you’ve wounded, but the people who would also love you… I… like them knowing.”

He strokes her back, not minding if more of the kids know who he is.

“The Ticos, Poe, and the Kennas think Padme is actually… General Mitaka?” She’s not sure if she’s got the rank and name right. “And they’re arguing about if you’re going to leave the Order or not, now.”

Kylo actually laughs at that. “Captain. He’s Captain Mitaka, and he’d be utterly horrified by that.”

“I take it you don’t get on?”

“I choked him in a fit of pique. Possibly more than once.”

She winces a bit at that. “Back in the Snoke days?”

“Yes. I made it up to him. I gave him Hux’s ship. He’s doing well with the _Finalizer._ Why do they think Mitaka is Padme? And why would he be leaving?”

“After… Finn and Rose saw you. All they could remember was dark hair and light skin. Apparently, the only people with enough of a private life to have a place where I could go every day are people who have their own ships. Command blacks. No armor. Been part of the First Order long enough. Young enough to have been one of Luke’s Jedi trainees. They never had anyone on the _Supremacy_ , so obviously no one on that ship _._ ” Kylo smirks a little at that, though, really, he wasn't actually stationed on the _Supremacy_ until after he took out Snoke. “They did have someone on the _Finalizer;_ you weren’t the only person who thought keeping a close eye on Hux was a good plan. And he had to be someone I could have run into at some point, so…”

“I’ve heard worse theories. And why is Mitaka staying with the Order?”

“He’s Maji, formerly Jedi, survived your attack on Luke’s Jedi school, and apparently going to take down the Jedi Killer.”

“Looking for round two, then?”

She nods.

He rolls his eyes. “So, I’m on the _Finalizer,_ rescuing Maji from the Jedi Killer, and plotting an assassination attempt against myself?”

She nods, again.

“Who was saying I should have left?”

“The Kennas.”

“Yeah, well, they’re right. If that was approaching true, I should leave. I’ve got nine centimeters and twenty kilos on Mitaka. Unless he’s a wizard with a light saber, which he wouldn’t be, because he didn’t get to actually _train_ with one, what with working his way up the ranks in the First Order, he can’t take me in battle.”

She snuggles in closer to him, feeling like they’ve gone from what might have been a useful conversation into utterly ridiculous. “It’s getting late.”

He pulls his comm to hand, and checks the chronometer on it. “Yeah.” He rubs his hand over his face. He’s got to shave this morning. Rey’s laser device has made that less necessary, but he still has to do it once or twice a week. He sits up, wincing a little as the cool air of their room goes galloping under the blankets. “Better insulation in here.”

The cottage has a heater/cooler, but it’s really only set to add or subtract about ten degrees from the ambient temperature. “Probably,” she says, sighing. “None of these little cottages are meant for real cold.”

They get out of bed, and he wraps his arms around her, and the top blanket around them, and they head for the refresher. Once the water is on, and the air is turning warm and moist, he says, “Did I tell you Jon’s thinking of having a first year party for the Order?”

“No…”

“Coming soon. More fancy dinners with powerful people.”

“Your favorite way to spend an evening,” she says, a bite of sarcasm in her tone.

“Oh yeah.” He drops the blanket, and they both step, quickly, into the shower. The hot water feels great. “I was thinking though, between paying for more insulation, and probably a few days where all I’ll want to do grit my teeth and be somewhere else, maybe we could use a few days, where we go somewhere with an actual casino, and put Poe’s theory of Maji gambling to the test.”

“Are you suggesting another vacation?” she asks with a smile, reaching for the shampoo.

“Yes. I am. That, or a very pleasant business trip. However you’d like to think of it.”

“I think if I come back with enough credits to buy insulation for all of the cottages, and better heaters, that that’s an awfully good use of a few days.”

He strokes her face, looking into her eyes. “Especially, if between those games, we get some time with just each other?”

She grins up at him. “Especially.”

 


	47. Throne

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay guys, it's vacation time again for the Rens and that means smut-o-rama. So, we've got pictures galore, and if you've got a laptop or desktop for viewing purposes, you might want to grab one. So you can really 'take in the view' ;)
> 
> That said, if you prefer a less obviously NSFW reading experience, the ff.net version of this (Same title, same author name. I'm easy to find) doesn't have pictures.

11/19/1

 

If there’s any place in the galaxy where the man who could have been Ben Solo should feel comfortable, it’s a casino.

But, like flying, using a blaster, and general life skills beyond knowing which bits of the Falcon need to be whacked into place at which times, Ben Solo didn’t sit on his daddy’s knee and learn sabbac or poker or jinny or…

Which isn’t to say Han didn’t teach him any games. They’d play 21, which Han thought was a good game for a little guy with small hands who was still learning his numbers, addition, and probability. And he and Lando would play with each other and Chewie, and once, the night before Lando’s wedding, with Leia and Lando’s wife to be, Annilee, and Ben did get to watch some of those games.

But, had he grown up with Han, Ben Solo, smuggler-in-training, would have likely set foot into a casino well before, now, creeping up on his 32nd birthday.

Rey meanwhile grew up around games like this, sort of.

Plutt owned them, and they could only “sell” their goods to him. He had control of the water and food supply, doling it out in small enough portions that no one would willingly part with it for any price. Everything else though… Barter, work it off if you had extra time, or throw the bones.

Rey was a nimble enough scavenger, and had enough untapped sources that she found when she was little, and could worm her way in, that she rarely played with the bones, she just didn’t much need to, but she’s familiar with the idea of it.

And Poe, having discovered the idea of Maji gambling, is teaching them games as fast as they can learn them. She likes them, a lot of them do, but…

Well, there’s a reason why sixteen-year-old Padawan Ben wasn’t playing card games at Luke’s, and it’s the same reason why many of the Maji don’t play either, not for fun, it’s not nearly as entertaining if you know the cards of everyone else at the table. And, at Rey’s school, there aren’t a lot of rules, but one of them is the Force sensitives aren’t allowed to play against any-non Force sensitive, but Poe, and they can play Poe because he knows how to count cards, and, probably, has his deck marked in a way they haven’t noticed yet.

So, right now, in “Padme’s ship,” three and a half hours from Gidi Secundus, a smallish, mid-rim planet, with what Poe considered a good selection of ‘nice’ but not ‘overpriced’ casinos, Rey’s teaching Kylo the games he should have learned as Ben, but didn’t.

The ship’s on autopilot right now, hurtling through hyperspace. She’s shuffling the cards, and he’s sitting back, watching them file through her fingers, listening to her explain the rules. It’s not that difficult. Get cards, look at them, arrange them in statistically less and less probable combinations, get rid of the ones that won’t help with that, get new cards, repeat, and throughout this process bet.

“Ante up," Rey says.

He taps the table between them. Not like they have anything to bet with. She smirks at him, slowly removes her bracer, puts it into the center of the table, and then grins at him.

He raises an eyebrow, sensing where she’s taking this. “Have I told you that pilot’s a bad influence on you?”

“You have, but this was Rose’s idea. Apparently, off-duty, late at night card games among Resistance members could get interesting.”

Kylo laughs, and pulls off a glove, he’s still in his command blacks. Then he drops it into the center of the table. “We should change before we get there.”

“Exactly.” She deals the cards. “Okay, look at them.” They both do.

“Uh…” As soon as she checks her cards, he knows she’s got the blue and red queens, a purple five, a yellow seven, and the red knight.

“I know. For right now, pretend you only know what you’ve got.”

“Maybe next hand and the ones after, we work on keeping the other one out of our minds.”

“Sure.” That’s a skill she’s rarely worked with, and it’s probably worth it, if for no other reason than so she can teach the others. “Okay, place a bet, or fold.”

He tosses his second glove in, and she adds her coat. No snow on Lirium yet, but sleet and freezing rain are an almost every day occurance, so all the time they’re wearing full coats, long trousers, long sleeves, and whatever jackets and sweaters they can make.

“How many cards do you want?” Rey asks.

“You’re asking?”

“Just because I know what I’d do with that hand doesn’t mean that I know what you want to do.”

“Three.” He passes his red two, blue six, and yellow nine over to her. “Exactly what you would have done.”

“Yeah.” She takes two of our own. “Okay, bet or fold again.”

Kylo undoes his belt, and tosses it on the table. “You know, this would likely be different if you actually cared if you won or lost.”

“I’d imagine it is.” She pulls her sweater over her head, baring exactly nothing, because she’s got a long-sleeved shirt on under it. “It’s likely different if you’re also trying to win, as opposed to just staying in the game to get me to take more of my clothing off.”

He smirks. “I wouldn’t do that, would I?”

“You’ve got a king, three, seven, nine, and four, in all four colors.”

“You won’t know what I’ve got next time,” he says sounding confident.

“You didn’t keep me out of your head before, you won’t now.” She’s got a cocky grin on her face as she takes the clothing from the center of the table, and hands him the cards. He’s slower at shuffling, unpracticed, and the first time he tries the bridge they go flying. He sighs, and then calls the cards back to him. At least cleanup is fast if you’ve got Force skills.

“I did it the first time, too.”

“Good.” He deals out the cards, and she just looks at him. “Right.” He pulls off a boot, and puts it on the table.

“Why do you have so much clothing?” Rey asks.

He stares at her in disbelief. “You’re wearing more than I am.”

“I live on a planet that has winter and substandard insulation. You’ve got chin to toe clothing and fully functional climate control.”

He looks at the boot pointedly, and she adds one of her own boots to the table. This is somewhat less sexy than she’d hoped.

He taps his cards, but doesn’t look at them. “Probably easier if we start one at a time. Don’t go looking for them, just let me keep it to myself for this hand.”

“I can do that.” She glances at her cards, and then focuses on his fingers holding his cards.

A second later he says, “That’s distracting.” The image of her gently sucking on his index finger is filling his mind. After all, right now he’s keeping his thoughts in his mind, not avoiding hers.

“That was the idea. I have no idea what’s in your hand right now.” She grins. “But I can think of a few places I want your hand.”

He laughs at that. “Your bet.”

She puts her other boot in, and he follows. “How many cards?”

“Two.”

He slides her two cards, and gently strokes his index finger along the back of her hand as he does. She catches his hand, lifting it to her lips, and lightly sucks the tip of his index finger for a moment. “That might be more inspiring than pulling off clothing.” He takes two cards for himself. “Winner gets two minutes to do _whatever_ they like.”

She grins at that. “That may indeed be more fun than strip poker. Bonus minutes for keeping our cards to ourselves.”

“So, no betting or ante then. Just winner takes… does… all?”

“Sure,” Rey says.

“Then get over here.”

“You’re not even going to flip your cards over?”

“I know I won.”

“Uh huh.” She stands up, straddling his legs. “What happened to one at a time?”

“It’s boring.” His hands come to her hips, and begin undoing her belt. “Timer, two minutes.”

They know the ship will let them know when the time’s gone down.

“And what do you want for your two minutes?” Rey asks, as if she doesn’t know.

“Right now, I’m getting you naked, and if there’s any time after that’s done, I’ll have you sit in my lap.” He’s unbuttoning her shirt, and tugging it off, tossing it behind him.

“And what am I going to do in your lap?”

He pulls her belt free, tossing it aside, then her pants, pushing them down. She kicks them off, lifts up, sitting on the table, and puts her foot in his lap, wriggling her toes. He pulls one sock off, and then the next. “Temperature to 25.” Her skin is prickling a bit, but the heater in the ship kicks in, warming the air.

 

 

She’s down to her tank top and shorts. He feathers his fingers over the undershirt, watching her nipples perk. His eyes trace over her, and he reaches up, stroking along her arm. “Gods, you’re so fucking beautiful.” His voice caresses over those words, practically licking them to her, and she shivers a little at it.

Tweep, tweep, tweep, twee—“Alarm off.”

Rey grins down at him, briefly, lowers herself into his lap, rubbing up against in him in an extremely pleasant manner, and then grabs the cards, and crosses to her side of the table, shuffling.

“Keep the cards to ourselves, winner gets two minutes, four if the other one doesn’t know what you’ve got.”

“That’s the game,” he says, eyes dark with excitement, and on her.

She deals the cards, and before he even picks them up, a vivid, full-color, full-immersion view of her in the pilot’s seat, naked, legs spread, him kneeling before her, lapping at her maomao as he strokes himself springs into her head.

“That’s cheating!”

“As long as it keeps my cards out of your head…” He’s still smirking, and keeping up the image. She’s gripping his hair now, pulling a little, as he sucks her pearl.

Two can play that game. She flips the image, putting him in the pilot’s chair, his legs splayed wide, as she kneels between them, holding his shaft in her hands, and gently, slowly licking the length, before skinning back the cap to suckle his tip.

He chokes a little at that image, feeling it thrum through him, and she gives him a triumphant look. Her cards are safely in her own head and—

“Fuck.”

His turn to smirk. She dropped the image to look at her cards, and he knows what she’s got now.

He shifts the image again, they’re in his throne room now, same general position, but he’s on his throne, in his full, formal Emperor Ren-wear, and she’s in a long, flowing cream colored gown, hair curled and flowing around her, lightly sucking him, and he’s stroking her hair, bending forward a bit to whisper in her ear, “That’s it, love, please your Master.”

 

 

Her eyes go wide at that, not expecting the fast flush of arousal and somewhat confused by the idea of calling him Master getting to her.

“Two cards,” his voice, here, now, says. And she slides them over. 

He’s looking vastly too pleased at himself and his ability to keep both lines of thought going at once. Granted, they literally owe their lives to his ability to do that, so playing cards isn’t exactly the crowning glory of this skill, but still…

She intensifies the vision. She hasn’t looked at her new cards yet, and if she can just… She’s still on her knees, his shaft in hand. She looks up at him, eyes soft, tongue and lips wet, shining, gently licking his shaft, and then rubbing the tip of it over her wet lips. She makes sure he’s got a very clear image of her tongue just gliding over the underside of his shaft as she kneels before him, keeping up full eye contact, and pulls back to say, “Yes, Master. I love to please you,” before sucking him as far down as she can go.

That absolutely has the desired effect. Kylo has literally no idea what her cards are, or his for that matter, or that they’re playing a game, or much of anything besides how infernally tight his fucking pants are, and how they need to come off right fucking now, if not five minutes ago.

She flips his hand over, and smirks. “I won.”

He’s in such a hurry to get up, he flips the table between them. “What do you want?”

“Clothes, off.” As he’s yanking them off she says, “On your throne, really?”

He floods her mind with about half-a-dozen images of them fucking away on his throne. “I like to think about it between meetings.”

“That’s!” She groans as he runs his lips over her throat, while both of them unfasten his tunic. “What you do between meetings?”

They’re not having great luck getting his tunic off of him. It’s unfastened, and shoved back, but his hands are spanning her back, thumbs along the sides of her breasts, fingers spread wide, little finger to little finger at her spine, and he’s nuzzling from her throat to her breasts. Can’t get the tunic, let alone the shirt, off of him if he doesn’t move his hands.

“Damn thing’s not good for much else. It’s the most uncomfortable fucking chair in the galaxy. Might as well be fantasy fodder,” he says between kisses and licks.

Her back arches toward him, and he sucks harder, lips pink against her nipple. Right now, they’re in his ship, she’s on the bench seats on the left side of the ship, he’s on his knees, between her legs, lips on her breast, hands across her back.

He floods her mind with the trappings of the fantasy. The throne room. His formal clothing half undone and shoved aside, hair falling from its queue. Her in an exquisite gown, pushed and pulled aside. The breast he’s currently lavishing attention on cupped in his hand, bodice of the gown askew. The skirt rauched up around her hips as one of his hands drops between her legs.

His real hand does that, too. His thumb stroking back and forth over her pearl, the fabric of her shorts wet between the pad of his thumb and her skin.

He shifts his hands, pausing for a moment to shuck off his tunic and shirt, and she pulls her shorts off. Then he’s between her legs again, holding her butt, raising her up a bit, because the bench seats are a bit too low for this. His mouth finds her, nothing soft or gentle about this, no light saying hello strokes. He’s holding her to his face, feasting upon her, and filling her mind with the fantasy of him on his knees, worshipping his queen, in his seat of power.

 

 

 

 

He lets go of her for a moment, her hips hovering by her own strength and the Force, and she expects to feel his fingers in her, because that’s happening in the fantasy, but she doesn’t. She hears rustling fabric, the sound of his groan, and knows he’s fisting himself.

The fantasy shifts. He’s on the throne with her. She’s straddling his lap, her back to his chest.

He helps her shift positions in the real world. Matching the image in the fantasy.

He’s still in his full Emperor wear, just with the fly undone. She’s naked. Covered by nothing but her hair, the Maji symbol, and his hand cupping her maomao, fingers gliding over her pearl. 

 

 

He licks her neck, so far into the fantasy that he’s having a hard time deciding where they really are.

She moans, sinking down on him. She shudders a little as he pressed harder, but doesn’t add any speed to his fingers.

He rocks his hips. “Let…” he’s panting for breath between words, “everyone… see… where… you… belong.”

“On your shaft?” she says with a deep grind, making him moan.

He tugs on one of her nipples, and she shivers, body fluttering around him. She’s close and knows he is, too.

He lets go, taking her face in his hand, twisting her toward him, and he kisses her, teeth on her bottom lip, before saying, “On my throne," the image, the vision of Lord and Lady Ren flowing through his mind. His hips jerk when he says it, and she knows that admitting it, out loud, put that plainly, sent him over the edge, and him jerking hard against her, his eyes open, dark, watching her, sends her over, too.

 

 

 

* * *

When they’ve cooled down a little, when their breathing has slowed down, and she’s flipped around so she’s across his lap, between his legs, he’s feeling a little sheepish about laying it out that clearly. Especially like _that._

And she’s not sure how to respond to it. And not sure how to feel about how it made her _feel._

 

 

He knows this isn’t something she actively wants. And he’s been doing (at least what he considers) an awfully good job of not pushing her toward it. But he can still see it. His mother and Luke often seemed to have flashes of prescience, but the closest he’s ever gotten to that is when he fights. Fist, saber, or ship, he’s got a general sense of what’s going to happen a heartbeat or two before it happens. Beyond that, the image of the two of them, Lord and Lady Ren, ruling the Order together, is it. That’s the sum total of his experience with any sort of prescience that seems to matter.

And that image has gone nowhere, save forward, becoming clearer and more detailed.

And in the image, she’s the one on the throne, and he’s standing a bit behind and to the side of her.

So, he’s feeling a bit stupid about tossing it in her lap like that. Especially _like_ _that_.

And he can feel it’s making her uncomfortable, too.

Finally, both of them sitting there, feeling awkward breaks when she says, “You’re allowed to want it. I’m not saying I want it, or that it’s happening, but, you’re allowed to want it and let me know you want it.”

He relaxes when she says that. He thinks for a moment, feeling how she’s not sure what to do with how she reacted to it. “And… you’re allowed to like playing with the idea, without it meaning anything. Without me thinking it means anything. It’s… just playtime.”

She nods. “Okay.” She’s got the sense though, that allowing herself to play with ideas like this is the first step toward actually making them real. Her face is against his chest, feeling the beat of his heart against her forehead. Her voice is quiet when she says, “I don’t know how to be a fancy lady in a pretty dress.”

He pets her hair. “I know.” He kisses the top of her head. “I’m not exactly impressing anyone with my Emperor Ren skills, either. Jon and Kinear would likely have me in full-time decorum training for the next six months if they thought I’d agree to it.”

She snerks a little at that.

“It’s playtime. If you’re ever wanting it to be more, I’ll jump on that with both feet, but until you want it, it’s playtime.”

“Okay.”

He strokes her hair again, and then looks at them. He’s in his socks, with his pants and briefs around his ankles, and he doesn't remember taking off her tank top, but it's gone now. “So… we’re two thirds of the way to changed, and I think I’ve got the rules of poker down, so…”

She laughs at that, standing up, legs feeling a little shaky, and grabs her shorts to wipe up with. “Finish getting changed, and then jinny?”

He stands up, picking up the table, and setting it and his chair to rights. “Sure.”

 

 

* * *

She’s gone over the rules and dealt the cards, when exactly the same issue that hit them before hits again. This time it’s even more troublesome than before, namely, they still know what the other one has in their hand, and in jinny, you can pick up your opponent’s discard, and it’s really difficult to play a real game if you know who’s got what.

“Neither of us really kept the other one out of their mind,” Rey says, looking at her hand, unable to get rid of anything because every card in her hand is something she needs or he needs.

“I’m actually not sure it’s possible. Not without cutting yourself off entirely.”

“Two thoughts at once?”

“That was the only thing I ever found that kept Snoke from dissecting my head. As long as the stronger set of thoughts were ones he approved of…”

Rey nods a bit. She watched him do that first hand, and it was utterly terrifying, because just like Snoke, the only version of it she saw was Kylo getting ready to take her head off with his lightsaber.

“Kinear, when he gets nervous about something, or wants me not paying too much attention to what’s going on skips from thought to thought to thought really fast. Tons of them. According to his wife, back in the day, you couldn’t go for a walk on Coruscant without tripping over a Jedi, so that technique works well enough he was doing it back in the day of the Republic.”

“Does he do that a lot?”

“Enough.”

“That’s ominous.”

He half inclines his head. “Half of the time he’s doing it, it’s because he thinks it’s better for me.”

“And the other half is better for him.”

Kylo nods. “I can feel he genuinely likes me, and what I can do for him, but that won’t, in any way, pause or slow him down if he’s ever better off by me not being in the picture.”

“That’s not comforting.”

Kylo shrugs at that. “I think it is. He’s a lot like my saber, I can cut myself on it if I’m not careful. Same with him. I can trust him utterly to be himself. He knows he’s in it for him and his family, and as long as I’m moving in a direction that will benefit them, I’ve got him on my side. And if I’m ever going to move in a direction that isn’t, I know I need to remove him before I do it. In the meantime, I’ve got him one hundred percent behind me, and he removes the people who aren’t interested in going where I want to take them.”

Rey’s not sure she likes that.

“Are you going to discard?” Kylo asks.

She sighs, and looks back at her cards again.  

 

 

* * *

Fashion is a language neither of them are particularly fluent in. Because of the last year, and Jon, and Kinear, and the occasional state-dinner-type-thing, Kylo’s poking a toe into the world of fashion, becoming vaguely aware of the idea that clothing sends messages, but it’s not like it’s second nature to him. And while he’s beginning to get the idea that he’s sending messages with what he wears, he really doesn’t know how to read what the people around him are telling him with their clothing.

Meanwhile, that toe is still quite a bit more than Rey’s been doing with this. No one cares what anyone wears on Lirium. The primary virtue of any piece of clothing over there right now is warmth. Anything else is moot.

That said, both of them can feel exactly how out of place they are in his trader gear, and her Naboon dress. Local men’s fashion appears to dictate bright silks, with a lot of vibrant patterns and sheen. The men are wearing what Kylo thinks of as long jackets, coming to mid-thigh, loose trousers, and some sort of sandal things. Many of them have their hair in a turban of a coordinated, but not matching, silk.

He’s never been anywhere men would wear pink jackets covered in gold paisley and lime green trousers, or vice versa, but that appears to be a rather fashionable combination here. As they’re walking from his ship to their hotel, he sees three other men in variations of those colors.

The women are wearing… neither of them have any idea what to call this. It looks like a long sheet of fabric that wraps around the hips, covering from hips to ankles, and creeps up the torso to drape over the shoulder. Under it is a small breast band. Many of them have fine gold or silver chains around their waists and/or wrists. Most of them have their hair long and loose, and he’s seen more nose rings than he knew existed.

Unlike their male companions, most of them are wearing dark colors or jewel tones, though the part of the wrap that drapes over the shoulder seems to be generally printed with some sort of shiny, metallic pattern.

All in all, this is one of the most ornate place either of them have ever been.

And, him in green trousers, brown boots, a white button up shirt, and brown leather jacket; and her in a loose and flowy coral dress that just brushes the back of her knees are attracting a _lot_ of attention. People are looking at them. Poe may have suggested this place, and maybe it gets a lot of travelers from elsewhere on the planet, but off-worlders, or people who dress like them, appear to be _rare._

“Why did you pilot recommend this planet again?”

“Trust me, I intend to ask him that as soon as I see him,” Rey replies, noting someone watching her legs, looking somewhere between scandalized and ready to proposition her.

“We walk into a casino like this and everyone is going to notice us.”

Rey nods in agreement.

This time, they have absolutely no trouble attracting the attention of the desk clerk. He’s borderline appalled to see them in his hotel, but he’s more than happy to set them up with the local currency, get them into their room, and out of the line of view of anyone else in the lobby, as fast as possible.

He’s happier yet to suggest a street where there are apparently multiple places to get clothing.

As they’re in the elevator, heading up, Rey says, “According to Poe, if you’re going to do this well, you are supposed to bend in. Look like the people around you. Not attract attention. And that means matching whatever the local look is. Part of us not hitting any of the expensive gambling cities yet is not having enough money to get a fancy yacht and clothing to go with it.”

Kylo assumes Poe would know.

“He doesn’t want us to try Canto Bight until we can seed ten million credits into looking right and losing before we win.”

Kylo blinks at that. “Ten million?”

“He’s figuring we’ll take at least fifty, but yes, between the ship, the clothing, the hotel rooms, and the rest of it, yes. We’ve got to look right to even get a seat at the sort of table where we can win that sort of money.”

“Okay.” He smirks a little. “And I suddenly know why my father never went after a really big score. He probably couldn’t get through the door of the sort of place where they played for that kind of money.”

“Or Chewie couldn’t.”

He smirks at that, too. “Chewie goes wherever the hell he wants to go, and everyone else just gets out of his way.”

The elevator doors open, and Rey has to admit that’s likely true.

 

 

* * *

Why Poe may have suggested this planet, this hotel, and this casino is (possibly) becoming apparent when they get into the room.

Poe had said the Excelsior was nice. He also said the exchange rate would work in their favor. Standard credits going fairly far on Gidi Secundus. And that was pretty much all Rey had to hear. Nice, comfortable, inexpensive. Sign her up.

Okay, this is not _nice._

This is nice’s beautiful, fashionable cousin dressed up for her wedding night. This is opulent and sexy.

 

 

The room is huge. Kylo’s room on the _Supremacy_ and their entire home on Lirium could fit in here and get lost. There are huge, arched windows on every wall, framed in intricately carved screens of wood. The bed practically the size of their living room, strewn with jewel toned pillows, and curtained in gauzy silks. There’s a dining area, for four. And a fully stocked bar. More of those windows, thrown open, showing off a balcony overlooking the city. Rey’s almost afraid to venture into the bathroom, fairly certain it’s going to have a swimming pool or some other over the top luxury.

Kylo dryly says as he looks around, their _one_ bag on his shoulder. “A warm, intimate space for us and two dozen of our closest friends?”

“We don’t have two dozen friends.”

“We better start making some if we’ve got this much space.”

She laughs a little at that, gently stroking the spray of orchids in a vase on the dining table. “I’m really starting to wonder what the hell Poe does when he’s not on Lirium.”

Kylo arches an eyebrow at her. He grew up in fairly posh circumstances, and this just blows that all away. He’s actually a little nervous about touching anything, and a little more nervous that someone recognized him and upgraded them. If this isn’t the best room in this hotel, he’ll be stunned. “Starting?”

He heads for the bed, touching the sheets. He assumes there have to be blankets somewhere, but they don’t appear to be on the bed. Just rich, silk, amethyst sheets, and six million pillows in every variation on the theme of purple he’s ever imagined. The mattress under his hand ripples a little, which makes his eyes go wide.

He sits, tentatively on it, and sees why there aren’t any blankets. “It’s a water bed.” And from the feel of it, it’s kept at just about blood temperature. There have been times when he’s been relaxed enough that drifting off for a nap in the bath seemed like a good idea, but drowning wasn’t, so he dragged himself out.

That wouldn’t be an issue here.

“You booked _this_ room?” he asks Rey, looking around.

“Uh… I’ll admit this certainly wasn’t what I was envisioning. Two hundred credits a night sounded like right about where to aim, and… assuming this is what I reserved, this is two hundred credits a night.” She’d been on their communications hub, Poe’s suggestion in mind, spent a few moments looking the place up, picked their second from the top of the line room, and then used her brand new, in her own name, credit chit, to book a room for them. Just doing it made her happy for three days. She sits next to him and the bed ripples. “Well, that’ll be interesting.”

He smirks a little at that. “I imagine.”

“I bet you do.” She gives him a little kiss. “So, shall we attempt to _blend in?_ ”

He starts to run his fingers through his hair, but he put it up when he changed into his Padme clothing, so he stops, midway to the gesture. “Sure.”

 

 

* * *

In the lobby again, Kylo really looks at the desk clerk, but if he’s figured out who Kylo is, he’s got it buried so deep in his mind that Kylo can’t pull it out.

 _Spell’s holding_ he thinks to Rey.

_Then I guess that’s what two hundred credits gets you here._

_If that’s true… What do we have to do to get to the high stakes tables?_

Rey shrugs a little. _I guess buy the chips and look like we blend in._

 _Okay._ He thinks with a grin.

* * *

Approximately nine minutes into the hunt for clothing, Kylo has come to the conclusion that he’ll happily stay here, if it means watching Rey “blend in,” for just about all of eternity.

He’s certainly aware of the fact that women wear clothing.

He’s even starting to develop preferences for certain cuts and styles, at least on Rey.

And here, in this shop where they aren’t the only people _not_ wearing local dress, and the lady helping Rey looks pretty comfortable with the idea that none of them know how to do this, he’s thinking that whatever they call this, he _really_ likes it.

A world where the ladies walk around with their waists and backs and arms naked, the rest of them draped in softly flowing fabrics, hair long and loose, soft, shimmery silks shifting around them with each step, and fine sparkly chains of silver and gold on their curvy bits… Yeah, he’s digging this.

 

 

* * *

Rey meanwhile is thinking about how it’s been, literally, less than three hours since she said she didn’t know how to be a fancy lady in a dress.

Apparently, _this_ , is a crash course in the subject.

They’re called sarees. 

They are, objectively, very pretty.

The store they’re in has a wall covered in skirts in an appealing array of colors, all of them dark or jewel-toned, and she’s liking the slate blue skirt and breast band she’s got on. The skirt is long, covering from just above the swell of her hips to the floor. And the breast band looks like it shouldn’t have much support, but it’s comfortable, so…

Okay, this part is fine.

And the fine silver chain she’s wearing that sweeps around her neck, down her chest to loop over her ribs. That looks great, and she can see Kylo staring at it, paying attention to what she’s wearing in a way he hasn’t since the first time she wore panties.

The thin silver chains around her arm. Also great. She really likes them.

Then there’s the actual saree part.

It’s beautiful. She loves it. It’s a shimmery blue-gray silk with a band of ornate silver lace/designs on the hem. That said, it’s _complicated._ The lady does… something. And she’s really trying to pay attention, but… There’s tucking, and pinning, and pleating, and more tucking, and more pinning, and more tucking, and more pleating, and then a bit more tucking and…

“Perfect!” the lady says, looking Rey up and down, very pleased with both how this came together and the fact that Rey’s standing about in some of the more expensive clothing in the place.

Rey’s looking in the mirror, and she likes what she sees, but she’s terrified of catching the skirt in her sandal and pulling everything loose, or eating something and dropping it on the saree, or… oh gods, at some point she’s going to have to go to the ‘fresher, and…

 

 

And apparently a certain level of panic is clear on her face, so the lady gently pulls her aside and says, “It’s a very fancy one, made of fine silks, but it’s practical, too. These dresses, originally, were worn by women who worked in rice paddies in a hot climate. You can pull the skirt up, knot it at the waist, and wade through shin deep water, pulling up rice shoots. The pins will keep everything in place, and… when you need to, you just hike it up, and when you’re done, drop it, shimmy a little, and it’ll drape properly.”

That’s a bit of a relief.

Still, it’s the finest thing she’s ever owned and she’s nervous about it. Let alone getting back into it. “Do you have… instructions for how to do this yourself?”

The lady smiles, and nods to the counter, where there are pamphlets on how to fasten a saree.  “We get a lot of travelers here. Probably why your hotel sent you over. And I can promise you, it’s much easier to get into the first few times if you’ve got help.” She eyes Kylo, who is certainly watching her like he’s going to especially enjoy helping her out of this, and likely back into it later.

That puts Rey at ease, some. She’s still very careful as she takes her first few steps. It feels odd to have a skirt swishing around her feet. And she’s certain that when she attempts to eat anything, she’s going to be nervous the whole time.

That said, she’s enjoying the warm, happy, content cloud of _ohh that’s just lovely_ more or less pouring off of Kylo right now.

And she’s somewhat amused at him idly thinking about maybe buying the shop. Then somewhat disturbed when she realizes that those might not be idle thoughts. He’s actually working through the credits conversion in his head. Though in the end, she doesn’t have to glare at him too hard to keep him from buying her more than three of them.

 

 

* * *

That warm, happy, content, ‘Look at me, I’ve got the most beautiful woman on the planet walking arm in arm with me, everything is spiffy’ feeling lasts until Kylo’s attempting to locate clothing for himself.

He’s, kind of, in a maybe Jon said it or maybe he thought it and Kylo wasn’t exactly paying attention when it happened, sort of aware that he might not exactly be a common size. And he’s also, sort of, in a not really paying attention way, noticing that most of the humans he’s passing on this planet are closer to Rey’s size than his.

And this will come together in a very sharp, distinct frustration when it comes to attempting to locate fabric cut in a manner that he can stick it on his personal body.

The style of Gidian men seems to be a low-waisted trouser, made of soft drapy silk, tight around the waist, loosely pleated, falling to the ankle, and then fastened with a thin, tight band around the ankle.

Okay, fine.

He’s on the tall end of what the shop has, but they’ve got trousers that’ll match his leg length. Four of them. The absolute longest ones they have. They also have trousers that will match his thighs circumference, or waist circumference, but not both.

So, he can get the proper amount of drape on his thighs, and have the pants immediately go galloping toward the floor because the waist is vastly too big to keep them up, or he can get the waist right, and have his trousers snug against his thighs.

He opts for that. First of all, he’s used to trousers snug around his thighs, second of all, snug is better than on the floor, and third, the jacket, assuming he can find one, will cover his thighs.

Then there’s the jackets. They’re similar to his command black tunics, with a lot of ornate printing. These come midway between the knee and hip, and fasten from the throat to the pelvis.

And like the trousers, the first problem is finding a jacket long enough. Okay, that gets rid of all but seven of them. Of the seven remaining ones, three fit his shoulders, and four fit his waist, but neither fit both. Since he can’t close the jacket if it doesn’t fit his shoulders, that becomes the size he aims for. They’re baggier than ideal at his waist, but not ridiculously so.

Fortunately, they do have a pair of sandals big enough for him.

One of them.

And if Rey is feeling a certain level of discomfort in her finery because it’s fine, Kylo’s mostly reacting to the fact that the darkest tone in the entire store is fuschia, which doesn’t much matter because the only jackets that fit him are in powder blue with a darker blue paisley, a bright, shiny spring green with that same darker green block print, and buttercup yellow with an ornate white block print.

 

 

He’s sincerely thinking that right now would be an excellent time to decide to put his Padme clothing back on and get to the high stakes table by swagger and Force skills alone, but he can see Rey watching him, looking way too damn amused, with a tangible cloud of _If I can do it, you can, too._

_You don’t look like an idiot!_

_Neither do you! It’s pretty._

His eyes narrow. _Have I ever come even close to suggesting pretty is anything I’ve ever desired being?_

_We can try other stores. Find something that fits better?_

He rolls his eyes a little, and then looks at the blue, green, and yellow monstrosities in front of him.

_Another store._

* * *

By the end of the third store both of them have hit what can be called shopping fatigue.

But, by the end of the third store, a, meaning one, singular, that required a bit of on the spot tailoring, pair of trousers, in, thank the Force, a subdued shade of maroon, had been purchased. As well as tan (If he’d been asked before setting foot on this planet if he’d ever voluntarily wear Jedi colors again, Kylo would have said no. Given the choice between tan or lime green, he decided he could put on Jedi colors again.) jacket with a maroon pattern that fit his shoulders nicely and was within a centimeter or two of fitting his waist.

It’s brighter and shinier than he would normally choose to be, but it’s not _pretty_ and he doesn’t feel like he’s flouncing about in a rainbow of shiny pastels, so… It could be worse.

He asked about the turbans, but apparently they’re a marker of religious affiliation, so he decided he didn’t need one.

That said, leaving the third store, no one is watching them. They have succeeded in _blending._

“Food?” Rey asks.

He’s nodding vehemently. They haven’t eaten in seven hours, and that’s likely part of being grumpy. “Food would help.”

Strolling around seems to help the mood, too. Locating a collection of stands selling yummy smelling meat on sticks, sizzling away over open fires helps even more. They wander from stand to stand, getting one of whatever it is they sell, trying them all.

And yes, Rey’s _very_ careful with the first few bites. But, after a moment or two, comes to the conclusion that she’s not going to make a mess of herself, and starts to eat like normal. (Though she is holding a napkin under the kabob.)

“Why don’t you like colors?” she asks him, as he nibbles a bite off their current kabob.

“I like colors just fine.”

She snorts at that. “Not on you. You’d have looked less pained standing in front of an army than contemplating putting on a yellow jacket.”

He rolls his eyes, taking another bite of this stick. It’s… meat… definitely meat. Yummy meat, rubbed in warm spices and grilled golden and sizzling, but beyond that, he’s got no idea what this is. He’s also noticed that there are vendors with fruit and veggies, so they’re going to hit one of them, next.

“I actually enjoy fighting, so that’s a bad comparison.”

She can feel what he’s not saying. The scar, the sharp angles of his face, the thrice broken nose and once broken jaw, his general size. He doesn’t feel like he belongs in bright, pretty things. They’re just… not him. Maybe there was a time they might have been, but not for at least the last fifteen years.

She strokes his hand. “I feel that way about fancy dresses.”

He nods. “It looks amazing on you.”

“Thank you.”

He stares at her, and just looking makes his heart feel tight. She’s just so _beautiful_ right now. He intentionally projects how this looks to him, how it makes him feel. Then he asks, “Do you think you look like an idiot in this? That it’s just _wrong_ on your skin?”

She shrugs a little. It’s not that she thinks it looks bad. There’s no _idiot_ aspect to this. _Wrong_ on the other hand. “Seven hundred and fifty credits on one outfit. I know where we’re going in it. I know why it costs this much. I get that this is an investment, and given what Poe’s told us, until we’re ready to spend those sorts of credits on one shoe alone, we’re not ready for Canto Bight, but… I’m an illiterate, nobody, desert rat. I don’t belong in silks and satins, and silver jewels. This is clothing for an—“

“Empress,” he says it, voice heavy, knowing that’s part of why he’s reacting so favorably to it. He kisses her, gently stroking his nose against her cheek. “I wish I hadn’t said that to you.”

“Mmm?” She’s not immediately seeing what she said had to do with anything he’s said in the past.

“That you were nobody. Snoke was always going on about the power of the Skywalker line, and this massive destiny of great families, and…” He rolls his eyes. “I’d meant you weren’t part of that. Not… that you were worthless.”

She blinks. “Oh. Uh… I never considered you’d meant it any way other than I was outside the ‘family line.’”

“Good.”

She looks around them, at the people on the street, and the fact that this sort of clothing is street clothing here helps, but… “When I got the clothing in Naboo… I could feel something shifting. It’s just cloth, but…”

“But it’s not. It’s…”

She rubs her lips together, and he’s a little amused to see that come back to him from her lips. “Choices. Options. It’s control. It’s not just floating along from situation to situation, picking whatever the best option is. It’s actually deciding where to go and who to be.”

“All is as the Force wills it?” There’s a wry set to his eyes and voice as he says it.

She nods. “It’s a lot easier to believe that when you’re just floating along, reacting.”

He nods at that, too, and another thought hits him, “And it’s easier when you stay where you know what you’re doing?”

That gets a loud sigh out of her. “Yeah. I don’t feel like everyone will be watching to see if I screw it up when I’m teaching. I’m learning with the kids, learning from them, too. We’re exploring and figuring it out together. And here, if I screw it up, no one knows my name or face, so it’s meaningless. I’ll be annoyed if I trip over the skirt heading into the casino and ruin it. Mad, too. But… in the grand scheme of things, it’s meaningless. There are other places, other casinos, just go to the next one.” She shrugs a little. “Somehow I’ve got the feeling it won’t work that way for Lady Ren.”

He shrugs a bit. “I feel like I’m constantly playing catch up when I’m out there. Like this is all stuff I should have learned as a child, and… And it’s not, and I didn’t, but I’ve still got to do it, and failure hasn’t killed me, yet, so…” He kisses her again. “Come fail with me?” He winces when it’s out of his mouth. “Speaking of sentences I wish I’d thought about before saying.”

She squeezes his hand. “We’re good. I understand.”

He kisses her again. “Yeah, but if I’d been thinking ahead, I might have said something like, ‘How about you and I make Jon and Kinear ecstatically happy. Take lessons with me, let’s learn it together, and how about we succeed together?’”

She strokes his face. “That’s a bit more polished, yes. And…” she sighs, shaking her head, “Let’s just do this, here, now, and see how it goes.”

“Okay.”

 

 

* * *

They’re halfway down the street, continuing to sight see, when another thought hits Kylo. “My dad hated this sort of stuff. And my mom kept dragging him into it. She felt like if he really loved her, he’d learn to be good at it. And he felt like if she loved him, she wouldn’t keep trying to change him, and…” he shakes his head. “So… I’d like doing this with you. I want you by my side for this. But… I’d rather go this alone, and have you at home, happy to see me at the end of the day, than you on that throne resenting me for putting you there.”

She nods at that, and says, “Good.”

 

 

His fingers are on her hand, holding it to his chest, and he’s looking her over, top to bottom. “And I love this, and if it were up to me, you’d look like this all the time, but, I want _you,_ not my fantasy of you.” _I will not be Vader_ arcs through his mind at that. His touch is light, but his words are heavy. “You’ve taken Kylo, every dark, hurt, angry bit of him, and haven’t tried to change me or pretend I’m someone else. You’ve given me the place, and option, and support to change myself, to become something different, something more, but you didn’t demand it, and you’ve never made me feel ashamed when I take a step back, or feel angry and frustrated.” He strokes the wedding band on her left hand. “And I refuse to do a millimeter less than that for you.”

This time she reaches up to kiss him.

 


	48. Maji Gambling

11/18/1

 

The casino of the Excelsior makes up half of the first floor, and apparently all of the second and third floor.

This time, when they go through the lobby of the hotel, no one looks at them twice. Up to their room, dropping off their street clothing, and Rey’s other sarees, and back down again, and they’re blending in well enough no one is aware of them.

They’re aware of the casino, though.

Casinos, at least this one, are _loud._

Neither Rey nor Kylo had anticipated that, but as they’re walking through the hotel lobby, closer and closer to the melee of gambling, the noise is going from a steady thrum to a wall of sound.

There are _machines_ all over the place. Poe hadn’t mentioned them to her, and Kylo doesn’t know what they are, other than infernally loud, so both of them spend a moment watching. People sit in front of them, feeding them coins, and then hit the buttons, and if they hit the buttons right, pictures line up properly, and coins come spitting out.

Rey keeps watching, and lets her senses worm their way into the mechanism. _It’s random,_ she thinks to Kylo.

He nods back at her. It doesn’t matter when or how you hit the buttons, the read out of the pictures is random.

 _Can you jigger it?_ Kylo thinks.

_No. It’s a program, not mechanical. You?_

_If I sit here focusing long enough._ He spends a moment feeling for how it works. _It pays out once every thirty tries, at random. Payout’s twenty-five to one, and it only takes one credit coins. Not worth it._

She nods.

 

* * *

Deeper in, as they get central hub of the casino, the cages where they can buy chips, they find a bank of ‘old-fashioned’ machines. The pictures on these are printed, on tumblers. Pull the crank, the tumblers roll, hit the buttons, and they stop. It’s entirely mechanical.

These take twenty-five credit chips, and payout twenty to one, if one line of pictures lines up, fifty to one if two lines line up, and three hundred to one if all three line up.

Rey smirks a little. While Kylo’s buying them chips, she stands by his side, looking like she’s watching all the games around them with wonder and wide eyes, and then makes sure the man sitting at the machine has a very good day.

He’s hopping up and down, squeeing with joy as coins come tumbling out around him.

The noise of the casino gets louder, but at least this louder is happy louder.

 _Making someone’s night?_ Kylo thinks to her.

_Sure. Besides, if I win it for one of us, it’ll look really suspicious if we then walk in and clean up on cards._

_Of course._

_Poe says we’re supposed to lose. If we win every hand it’ll look suspicious, and they’ll boot us out._

_Do just well enough to stay in and then bet big on a good hand? Dad believed in that._

_Poe does, too._

Kylo’s smirking.

_What?_

_Luke told me Dad’s good luck dice were weighted. I suppose that’s about the same as sauntering on in able to read minds._

Rey laughs. _Probably. So…_

_Let’s go win some money._

* * *

Most of the first floor is machines. Lots and lots and lots and lots of those spinning picture machines. People all around them are feeding them chips, watching the pictures scroll, waiting, anticipation building, until the pictures stop, and no coins come out.

They both watch, nodding, feeling that the machines are all set to payout slightly less often than they take in. Get lucky, play the right time, and more importantly _stop_ playing at the right time, and you can leave ahead, but if you spend the evening at it, you’ll lose.

Between and through and around those machines are other ones that turn credits into chips. Women and men in matte black silks weave around and through the crowd, with trays of drinks and food. If you didn’t have to sleep or relieve yourself, the casino would happily make sure you never had to leave those machines.

There’s nothing for them on the first floor.

“One of these days, we’ll have to see if we can get a Force slicer,” Kylo says, quietly as they head to the second floor.

Rey tries to imagine how that might work. Nothing springs to mind. That said, if it could…

 

 

* * *

The second floor is more interesting to them. There are card tables all over here. Most of them seem to be 21 tables, or it’s vastly more complicated, and risky cousin, Sabbac. Lots of them. But there are roulette tables, too, and a collection of dice games.

If it weren’t for the fact that the table shifts, at random, the value of the cards, Kylo would be a tempted to try a hand at Sabbac, but… Any skills he can bring to bear on these games require the other players to be players, not machines.

Around the far edge of the room are private games. Most of the ones they see are already full, but eventually they find a poker table looking for a fourth and fifth.

A blonde with green eyes and two days of stubble waves them over. “Looking for a game?”

“We are,” Kylo replies.

“Amidala, Rey and Ben,” Rey says, extending her hand. The blonde stands, taking it, kissing the back. She feels Kylo stiffen a bit, but the man isn’t being out of line. At least, not where he’s from. This is friendly and warm, but not an attempt to seduce a woman who’s standing next to her husband.

“Porter Herm,” he nods to the… Rey’s not sure what the person to his left is. Not human. Not any species she’s ever seen before. He… she… it puts her a little in mind of Maz Kanata, but mostly because of the similar coloring. In stature it’s about the size of a wookie. “That’s Lammath Fra Holmes.”

Lammath nods to them, and says, “Greetings Ben and Rey,” his voice is modulated enough that Rey wonders if he’s got some sort of translator device hidden in his clothing.

“And here on the far side of the table is Alainia Neekeri.” This one is certainly female, and human. Like Rey she’s in a lovely silk saree, her’s is emerald green and gold, and her dark skin and hair all but shimmer in the multi-colored lights of the casino. She nods to Rey and Ben.

“She’s quiet. Doesn’t speak, but the hand gestures are awfully straightforward.”

Kylo pulls a chair out for Rey, and she sits down. He follows her, seating himself.

“Newcomers?” Lammath asks.

“Yes,” Rey replies. “One of my friends said this was fun, and we’ve never done it before, so…”

“Honeymoon?” Herm asks, as he shuffles and deals the cards.

“How…” Kylo starts to ask.

“You’re the first man who didn’t ogle Laini over there. So, honeymoon,” Herm replies with a smile.

 _He’s intentionally making you slightly uncomfortable to see what you’ll do._ Rey thinks to Kylo.

_I know. The woman can speak._

_I can feel that, too._

Kylo gently strokes Rey’s arm. “Yes, you’re right. Out to celebrate, and maybe do something silly and foolish, but fun.”

Herm grins at them. “Well, if you’re looking for a folly, I think we can set you up for that. Have either of you played regularly?”

“Not regularly,” Rey says. _Can you read Lammath, at all?_

_Not yet._

“Enough to know the rules?” Herm asks.

“Enough to know the rules, and a little bit about how the wider game works,” Kylo says.

“Well, we all start somewhere. Since you’re new, ante’s a tenspot.”

 _Not yet?_ Rey thinks to Kylo.

_I’ll get there. We’re supposed to lose, this’ll just make it easier._

All five of them put a ten credit chip into the center.

“First round, I deal the cards,” Herm says, flipping through the deck, his hands slick and practiced, the cards whispering between his fingers. “Each hand we swap on down the table. That way no one can claim the deal’s crooked.”

“Seems wise,” Rey responds. _Lammath’s really off._

Kylo’s trying not to make it clear he’s focusing on Lammath, but he more he does the more he’s coming to the same conclusion Rey is. Something’s just _off_ about it.

A lady in a matte black saree, with a tray of drinks and bowls of snacks comes by. “New blood for you old parasites,” she says, voice light, eyes not.

 _They’ve got some sort of scam going,_ Rey thinks to Kylo, feeling it from the waitress.

_I feel it. Don’t eat or drink anything she’s serving._

_Good plan._

“Can I get you two anything? Gambling’s thirsty work.” Herm tips her a hundred chip as she serves the drinks.

“We’re fine,” Rey says.

“Just ate,” Kylo adds.

“If you change your mind, just holler!” she says with what looks like, but isn’t, a warm smile. She sets the snacks down, and heads off.

Everyone picks up their cards.

 _Could be worse,_ Rey thinks to Kylo.

 _You could have my hand,_ he thinks back to her.

Rey doesn’t smirk at that.

Herm looks to Lammath, who puts thirty into the pot. Alainia nods, taps her hand against the table, and also puts thirty in. Kylo folds. He already knows that Herm, Rey, and Alainia are sitting on six of the eight cards that could get him to anything that could be considered a winning hand. Rey takes thirty out, and raises to forty. “That’s how we do this, right?”

“That’s how we do this. Gutsy for a first round. Must have something nice in that hand.” Herm replies.

Reys got two tens, not the highest combo in anyone’s hand, but she also knows that the other two aren’t in Kylo, Herm, or Alainia’s hands. Twenty cards accounted for. One in sixteen shot a ten shows up, so… why not?

Herm, Lammath, and Alainia all put an additional ten in.

“Max three new cards, unless you’ve got an Emperor, then you can get four.” Herm says, and then looks to Lammath.

Lammath passes two cards back. Alainia one. Kylo doesn’t raise an eyebrow at that. Her hand isn’t that good, but if she’s trying to bluff… Rey takes three. None of which are a ten.

_Pair of tens won’t win. You going to stay in?_

_Let’s see how expensive it gets._

Herm starts the bet at fifty. Lammath doubles it.

 _Shouldn’t he be excited or something if he’s doing that?_ Rey thinks to Kylo.

_I’d think so. Maybe he’s so used to playing it’s not interesting any more._

_Maybe._ Rey lets herself focus on Lammath further. _He’s not feeling anything, at all._

Alainia puts her hundred in, and adds another fifty, with a grin.

Kylo grins wide back at her. _She’s got two eights and an Emperor._

_Bluffing._

Rey puts her one fifty in, too. Her tens beat Alainia’s hand, but not Herm’s pair of Emperors. _She’s trying to flush Herm out._

_I think so. But he knows her bluff._

Herm folds. “More than I want to lose this early in the game. Lammath, you going to make it more interesting?”

Lammath is quiet for a moment, and then adds an additional fifty. “Call.”

Kylo catches it while Lammath is quiet, and Rey’s a second behind him. _Cyborg,_ he thinks to her.

 _I’ve never seen one before,_ she thinks back. _Heard of them, but…_

He’s not letting the shock show on his face. Cyborgs, biological bodies, at least to some degree, and computer minds, are illegal on pretty much every system. Even the Empire outlawed their manufacture. _He’s ancient or so fucking illegal it’s almost impossible._

_I know!_

Alainia taps the table, her version of call. Both of them look to Rey, seeing if she’ll up the pot. “I’m good where we are. We show our cards now, right?”

“Correct,” Lammath says, and Alainia nods, flipping her cards over.

Rey shows hers, too. “Not bad for a first time,” Herm says as she does it. “Lammath?”

Lammath wins the hands with two pair, emperors over eights.

Herm smiles, looking smug, and takes a sip of his drink. “Corpse hand.”

“Corpse hand?” Rey asks, as Lammath grabs his chips, and they hand their cards to him.

“Emperors over eights. You ever hear of Wandad The Hutt?”

Kylo and Rey shake their heads, and neither of them have heard of Wandad, so they’re genuinely listening to the story as Lammath shuffles.

“Wandad was a famous gambler back in the day.”

“When was back in the day?” Kylo asks.

“About a hundred years ago. Back before the Old Republic fell. And he had one of the finest casinos on Coruscant. Known throughout the galaxy as the place for a high stakes game. He ran clean tables,” he takes a sip of his drink, making an exaggerated sound of pleasure, hoping it’ll get Rey or Kylo drinking, “and tight games. In his house, there was no funny business with the cards. But, because he ran such a tight house he tended to annoy some of the ‘less tight’ establishments. So, several of his competitors got together and suggested a massive, winner takes all, impossibly high stake tournament, knowing there was no way he could stay away if the price was right.”

“What was right?” Rey asks.

“Ante,” Lammath says, breaking the story. “Fifty buy in.” All five of them slide a chip into the center, and as Herm continues telling the story, Lammath deals.

“Two hundred and fifty million to get into the game. One hundred of the best players, and you’d have to be to have the credits to get into that game. Wandad was sure he was the best of the best, so he put his house into hock to buy into the game.

“And he was _good._ So good. And lucky. It’s not enough to be good, you’ve got to be lucky, too. All the skills in the universe don’t matter if you draw a duce on an Emperor’s Flush. He made it to the last hand, and when it was just him and Cerren D’Rhys, and twenty five billion credits were on the line, and he flipped that last hand over, looked at his emperors over eights, and saw Cerren had three fives, he just flat out died.” Herm makes a “pbbth” sound. “Since then, that’s been the corpse hand.”

Rey and Kylo chuckle at that, and check their cards.

“So… why’d they put together the competition if he was that good,” Rey asks.

“Oh, they were going to kill him if he won, they just didn’t have to,” Herm replies, nonchalant. “So, you in Laini?”

Alainia pushes another fifty into the middle. This time she’s already got two sixes, and both Kylo and Rey know no one else, except maybe Lammath, has one. Kylo’s also got the aforementioned three twos, and both he and Rey are rapidly coming to the conclusion that it’s likely a good idea to go hunting for a table where a cyborg isn’t playing.

 _Any idea how he’s cheating?_ Rey thinks.

_Nope. I didn’t see him mess with the cards, but he had to have. The odds of this being natural are more or less nonexistent._

Kylo’s also, for the moment, got the winning hand (again, besides whatever Lammath is holding) at the table.

Kylo pushes his fifty in, and Rey does, too. Herm rounds out the first set of bets, and they move to the cards.

Alainia takes two. That puts her up to two sixes and two queens. Not bad, but not great. Kylo takes two, and gets a pair of tens. Rey takes three and goes from a nothing hand to a nothing hand. Herm takes one, and ends up with a busted straight.

Alainia starts off by upping the bid to two hundred, with a smile. Kylo sees her and ups it another hundred. _I’m supposed to win this one. Make us want to keep playing._

 _Then by all means, win it._ Rey sees his three hundred and takes it to five.

“Competitive little thing, aren’t you?” Herm says.

She smiles. “With him, I am.”

“I’ve got card salad,” Herm says, dropping out of the game.

Lammath stares at them, and then pushes four hundred credits into the center. Lainia smirks, and tosses in another hundred. Kylo follows, and ups it another hundred. Rey’s realizing that if she keeps this up, she’s going to have to show off she’s got a hand of nothing, and folds.

Kylo eyes Lammath, who appears to be thinking, and then folds.

Kylo raises an eyebrow to Lainia, and adds in her hundred before knocking on the table, and flipping over her cards, with a smile. He smiles back, flipping over his.

Herm whistles. “Sweet hand, lad, sweet hand.”

“Thank you.” Kylo pulls the chips near, and hands them to Rey. He stands up, and Rey does her best to look a little startled.

“Love?”

“Dad always said, quit while you’re ahead. This has been fun.” He nods to the rest of the table, as Rey stands up.

“You sure you don’t want to stay?” Herm adds.

“So many games to play. Try a few more and maybe we’ll swing back again,” Kylo says.

“Please do,” Lammath replies.

Rey nods, smiling prettily at them.

 _We were going to get great cards the next hand, bet big, and then lose, right?_ she thinks to Kylo, feeling what the other players were planning.

_That’s what I was feeling. No matter what showed up in our hands, Lammath would have something better._

Rey keeps feeling it out. _Lainia deals, we show our cards, and then he does. He changes his cards to whatever he needs._

_Cards didn’t feel electronic, but I’m sure they were. That last hand was too perfect if they weren’t. Did your pilot mention anything about that?_

_No. I don’t remember anything about how to cheat at poker. I mean, other than how we do it._

“Dice?” Kylo asks, out loud, offering Rey his arm.

“Sure.” She wraps her arm around his. “Let’s see if you’ve got any natural talent for it.”

 

* * *

The answer to that would be _no._ At least, not any natural talent beyond the same ‘natural talent’ that let him be good at a lot of other games involving small metal bits moving about.

He wins one for Rey, and she wins one for the guy two spaces down from them, both of them finding it easier to control the dice if they aren’t the one rolling. But even with that, nudging the die just enough to get it to flip to the right shape is tricky. They bounce when they hit, and making it look natural when they land is tricky.

Doable, but tricky. If they’re going to stick with this… or something like it… Might as well play for bigger stakes.

 

 

* * *

They’re ahead for the night, not massively, but better than average. Their outfits and the rest of the vacation is paid for by this point.

Crossing by the card tables again, Herm waves at them, and Rey waves back, heading for a different side of the casino.

Kylo’s still watching the table, watching them play.

_I know you can fix things more or less just by thinking about it. How about breaking them?_

_I don’t know. I’ve never tried. Why?_

_Want to take another swing at poker?_ She can feel his mental smirk.

_What are you thinking of doing?_

_I know I can cause an electrical disruption. Anything from shut the whole place down to make the lights flicker. How about you put some attention to those cards, see if you can figure how Lammath controls them, and then I’ll muck with the lights and you kill the cards._

Rey doesn’t let the grin show on her face. _Out some cheaters?_

_Something like that. Unfortunate power surge kills their deck or something._

_What’ll that do to Lammath?_

_I don’t intend to use_ that _much power. He should be fine. Other than whatever it is they do to cheaters here._

_Sounds good. Let’s get some drinks of our own, and snacks. Settle in for a few hands, win some, make sure we’re not dealing, and then do it._

Kylo likes that idea just fine.

 

 

* * *

The signature drink of this place is a mix of rum, coconut milk, lime juice, and cane sugar juice. They get one, without rum, watching the bartender, and both of them take very tentative sips of it, letting their Force both get a sense for what’s in there (coconut milk, lime, and cane sugar juice, it’s yummy) and the motives of the bartender. (Good tip. Rey gives him a hundred chip; he seems pleased.)

The snacks are a little basket of assorted berries, and small, spherical pastries covered in powdered sugar, filled with custard or jam. Again, getting it directly from the bar that offers snacks seems to have made sure they got clean food.

The scam is probably just that one waitress working with that one table. But on the off chance it’s not, they’re being wary.

Fortified with a drink and snacks, they wander back to the poker table.

Herm compliments their drink and snack choice, suggest they try the pickle mix next, and tells some amusing stories while they play four hands of poker. It’s fun. They’re winning… between the two of them… enough.

They’re up by five hundred credits when the ‘big hand’ comes through. Kylo’s sitting on a nine high straight, Rey’s got three queens, they’re betting against each other, pushing the money up, and catching Herm and Lammath into their web.

The bets are called, Alainia dealt, so the first one to show is Kylo. He’s staring at his cards, grinning at them, starting to say something like “And this is how the game is played,” when the lights in the casino, the electronic machines, and the music all die.

It’s not long enough for anyone to panic. Maybe three seconds, and it’s all back on again. But once they’re on again, Rey says, “My cards are blank!”

She yells it, loud, and in the quiet of the casino just going dead, her voice carries. Security is over to them in a moment, and a moment after that Herm, Lammath, and Alainia are being ‘escorted’ out of the casino.

And Kylo and Rey have been comped their room, meals, and given two ten thousand credit chips, by an extremely ‘apologetic’ general manager who looks just about ready to disembowel himself over the shame of this. (Apparently, the game is run by whomever sits at the table, but the cards are ‘guaranteed clean’ by the casino.)

Rey takes one of the two chips, presses it to her lips, smiles at the manager, and says, “I can feel it. This is our luck turning around.”

 

 

* * *

Herm was right about one thing. Those little baskets of pickles are addictive. Bright fruits and veggies all crisp and cool. Some are sweet, some salty, some sour, some a combination of the three, and they’ve been through three baskets of them, and two more poker games, when they decide to head to the roulette table.

_This is what Poe considers our best bet for a big run. At least, until we’re willing to buy into a high stakes table._

Kylo nods, eyeing it.

For a moment they just watch. It’s simple enough. Little ball, spinning wheel. Ball goes one direction, wheel goes the other, eventually the ball stops in one of the little slots, and whoever has money on that slot wins.

You can bet odds, evens, black, white, or a combination thereof, (black odd), you can bet number ranges (13-15), or you can go for one specific number. With the payout getting higher and higher the lower the chance of the ball landing on your bet.

Get the right number, and the pay out is sixty-four to one.  

And they’ve got twenty-thousand credits just sitting in Rey’s hand.

 _Practice._ Kylo thinks. When they worked with the dice, they both found that making something come up with a specific number is _not_ easy, and this… Two sets of near frictionless surfaces moving against each other in opposite directions. It’s not that they can’t jigger it. It’s mechanical, so it can be jiggered, but it’s going to take some time to figure out how to make it work and _look_ right. Just like with the die, if the ball suddenly leaps out of the cup it lands in and hops into another one, that’s _not_ going to work.

Rey wishes she could close her eyes to do this. There’s so much _stuff_ in here. Noise and lights and people and shutting that out to just the ball and the wheel is difficult.

Kylo gently strokes her back, having similar issues. This is no different that stopping a bolt mid-flight. Easier probably. Except, of course, generally, if he’s stopping bolts, he’s in a whirl of the kind of emotions he’s _good_ at swimming through, anger, rage, fear, pain. But, most of the people around him are in a pretty good mood, or drunk, or both, and that’s not exactly helping his focus.

So, they practice. And some of the people around them have a really good day. And some of them don’t. They bet each time, and usually, lose.

Rey’s been putting chips on white eighteen, yesterday’s date, supposedly their wedding, the whole time. She’s been talking about how this is their lucky day, and it’s going to pay out. They just have to have patience.

Kylo’s been playing the table. He’s been up and down, mostly down.

Between the two of them, they’ve got the twenty thousand in the two chips, and a hundred and fifty left of their seed money.

Kylo bets his ten thousand chip, on black odd, and on that one, Rey makes sure it lands on a white. Can’t afford to win two in a row, and 4 to 1 is lower than she wants for their big hit.

“Last chip,” Rey says, smiling at Kylo, putting her ten thousand chip on their ‘wedding’ date.

“You sure?”

“It’s our lucky day, and this is my lucky chip.” She’s smiling big. The roulette croupier doesn’t actually roll her eyes but they can both feel it behind her ‘encouraging’ words. After all, getting people to do things like this is _why_ the casino was willing to comp them the chips.

The croupier spins the wheel, and drops the ball, and both of them spend the next minute gently, easily, just nudging it along until it drops right into that cup with a sweet little click.

When it lands, Rey jumps up, shrieking with joy. Part of that’s so it looks right, part of it’s just feeling really, really pleased at the two of them having pulled it off perfectly.

 

 

* * *

“You weren’t kidding about lucky,” the manager says when he returns to the roulette table.

Rey’s grinning all over the place, looking like everything in the galaxy is sunshine and roses.

“Can we get a picture of you two for our winner’s board?”

They both feel Kylo’s alarm spike at that. The do-not-recognize spell works on people, because he’s near them, using his Force. They’ve got no reason to think it would work on a photograph. Let alone a photograph viewed months after they’ve left.

But the manager is already pushing them together, moving them around for better light, and has his camera out. “Here, let’s just… This one is going to be great! Both of you are so striking together… Uh… just a few steps over… Don't want you in a shadow…”

Kylo ducks his head against Rey’s a millisecond before the camera clicks. He’s in half profile, left to the camera, and a good amount of his hair has fallen over his face. With the exception of Jon, he’s certain no one has spent enough time studying his face to identify him from that photo.

 

 

“Oh… your face isn’t in the shot,” the manager says.

“I know,” Kylo responds, and that’s the end of that.

As the manager is setting them up with their winnings (he alone has the keys to the 100,000 and higher chips), he says, “Want to try double or nothing?”

Rey raises an eyebrow at Kylo. Both of them feel a bit of temptation at that.

“You mean put all 640,000 on the roulette table?” Kylo asks.

“It’s your lucky day, right?” the manager says with a huge grin. “It’ll make headlines if you win twice.”

Rey stares at him. “Can you cover us if we win?” Off the top of her head she doesn’t know what sixty-four times six hundred and forty thousand is, but she knows it’s over thirty-five million credits.

The manager smirks. “Of course. A casino this size, we’re required to keep half a billion credits in our accounts at all times.”

They can both feel that he knows he’s had the table checked from top to bottom, making sure they won legitimately, while he was getting the photo, and if he can get them to put that money down, it’s not going to walk out of the casino with them.

“How about this,” Rey says, taking the ten thousand credit chip again, and giving it another little kiss. “This is the good luck one.” She puts it back on their ‘wedding day’ and looks to the croupier.

 

 

She spins the wheel, and rolls the ball, and the manager doesn’t actually wet his pants when their day comes up again, but he does look like he wants to.

They can feel him thinking that that was a brand new ball, and that machine is working perfectly, and _no one_ is that lucky, but the game is clean so…

“Congratulations,” goes limping out from between his teeth.

 

 

* * *

In the cosmic scale of things, not quite 1.4 million credits in five hours isn’t that big of a deal. Even at that casino, they aren’t the ‘big winner’ of the night. Upstairs, on a floor they never visit, there’s a jinny game going where the buy in alone is ten million credits.

So, it’s not like they’re breaking any records in terms of credits won. And they’re in no danger of breaking the bank here.

They are, however, the only people in the 78 year history of that casino to hit on the same number, two tosses in a row, on roulette. 

And they are two of the only people to go in there, win, and then _stop_ while they still have their winnings.

 

 

* * *

Exactly six weeks later, Almer Hymm, the manager of the Excelsior who was on duty the night the Amidalas played, will come across a bit of news on his usual holo feed. Since the Order placed half a dozen recruiting stations in the Gidi system, there’s been a lot more news about it. Some good, some angry (Wage rates aren’t going up, yet, but the talking heads think they will be, especially since the Order pays in standard credits). This one’s fluff. It’s about three minutes long, and gives a brief piece on the first year celebrations the Order held earlier in the month.

He won’t really be paying attention. It’s not exactly important to him, but… There’s a woman standing next to the Master. He catches the view of her out of the corner of his eye.

Then he backs the video up and really watches.

A moment later, he’s tingling all over, burning with electricity, biting his lip. He knows he has a picture, so he goes to his winners’ wall to check.

It’s hard to tell if it’s the same woman. It’s absolutely a very similar woman. But there’s no possible way it’s not the same man. The only reason a man wouldn’t allow his face to be photographed is because he _knows_ anyone seeing the picture will identify him.

Looking at the picture, he doesn’t know if he should sag with relief, because when someone in his casino cheated the Master of the Order, he took it in stride. Or if he should burn with anger, because the Master of the Order, a fucking Jedi or whatever he is, the rumor mill isn’t sure, other than it’s abundantly clear he uses the Force, walked into his casino and played roulette, and _won_.

Then another wash of hot tingly emotion flows through him. He all but dared them to go lay all their winnings down and try their luck again.

He looks at the woman in the picture. She could have cost him 40.9 million credits. A loss like that, especially on his recommendation, would have cost him his job.

But she chose not to.

He doesn’t know what to think about that. Did they, honestly, genuinely _win_ twice in a row? Jedi control the Force, it doesn’t just smile on them, right? But… why only the 1.4 million they took? Why would the Master be gambling anyway? The man runs the largest space navy in the galaxy. He has money if he needs or wants it, let alone in such small quantities.

He rubs his hand through his hair, utterly puzzled by this, and unsure what, if anything, he should do about it. Other than, of course, set a little note in their system. If the Amidalas come back, they’re to be immediately treated to the highest of high rollers standards.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys!
> 
> Okay, that one was just fun. More *ahem* interesting stuff on Wednesday. ;)
> 
> If any of you like the "behind the scenes" stuff on how I make my art, or some other angles/lighting schemes for the pictures, I've got two posts up on the blog: https://kerylraist.wordpress.com/ about it.
> 
> See ya Wednesday!


	49. Playtime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, we've got pictures in this one, and they're not even remotely safe for work. Not at all. Not even close. 
> 
> And, because I just can't leave well enough alone, I sort of rendered some extra views that don't strictly need to be in this chapter, but... You know... If you want a few extra angles and whatnot...
> 
> Anyway: https://wordpress.com/post/kerylraist.wordpress.com/64 if you want to see the extra shots.

 

11/19/1

_It’s playtime._ Rey’s thinking to herself later that evening.

See, the thing about winning a large amount of money at a casino is that said casino will then do everything in its power, short of just grabbing you, to make sure that money _stays_ inside the casino.

Once they’d gotten the funds transferred, (which took a tad more Force talent than it should have. The manager was more than happy to suggest that they could use the casino’s vaults, no need to transfer the money to Rey’s account. One look, a little nudge, and that money _moved._ ) the manager assigns someone to not exactly hover over them, but there’s this very attractive person with a voice like liquid sin suggesting that they’ve got shows, and restaurants, and a spa, several clubs, and do they want anything else to drink, and maybe Mr. Amidala would like a suit that actually fits, and…

If there’s any possible way to get that money back into their coffers, they’re all over it.

 

 

* * *

Kylo’s more or less just flowing with it. They won 1.28 million. They were aiming for a million. So… that’s a lot of money to play with. He figures that as long as they don’t hit the games again they can do anything and everything even vaguely interesting and not blow through a tenth of what’s left.

So… It’s been… gods… more than two decades since he went to a show, and, yes, the memories are fuzzy, but he’s fairly sure he liked that back in the day. He knows he enjoys reading plays, when he has the time. So, he wouldn’t be averse to doing it again. And if clubs means what he thinks it does, that means dancing is an option again, and he’s really not averse to seeing Rey shimmy and bounce in this outfit or one similar to it.

Plus, if he can get a suit that actually fits him, and is in a color he feels comfortable in... Rey catches that line of thought and just looks at him. _Not black._

_I like black._

_I know, Master Ren, but if you go wandering about out there in head to toe black, you might as well just drop the spell and use your real name._

His eyes narrow. She’s got a point. _Green?_

 _You look good in green._ She can see the color he’s thinking of. _Not slightly greenish black._

Kylo doesn’t actually pout at that.

* * *

“Look, sitting around watching him pick out colors with a tailor is boring. I promise you, Mr. Atherson won’t let him pick bad colors, so you don’t need to hover.”

Unni. Their ‘hostess’ is named Unni. Her primary job seems to be getting every single one of those credits they won back into the casino.

And right now, since Kylo’s decided that he wouldn’t mind a suit that fits, or more specifically one in a color he likes, because the clothing on his body right now is comfortable enough, physically, Unni’s working on finding a way to get Rey to do something that involves money flowing back to the casino.

“Have you been to our spa?”

Rey’s not entirely sure what a spa is. “Pools?”

“Oh, honey! Well, yes, there are pools, too. Every temperature you can imagine, and some smaller private ones, too.” She flashes them a little smile. “Honeymooners tend to like them. But, no that’s not all,” she’s wrapping an arm around Rey, edging her toward the elevator.

Rey’s debating stopping her dead or just going along with it.

Kylo mentally shrugs at her. _Watching me pick out colors will be boring. Might as well see if you like whatever this is._

_You don’t know._

_Pools would have been my best guess, too. Worst comes to worst, you don’t like it and leave._

Rey sighs a little. _It’s playtime._

Kylo nods. _So, go see if you like the game._

 

 

* * *

Unni gets Rey up to the roof of the Excelsior. And yes, there are pools. Five of them. All laid out to look like natural ponds cascading into each other, surrounded by some sort of green plants, keeping the rest of the roof out of view, save for a few paths leading off of them.

“This is the main soaking area.”

That makes sense to Rey, there are plenty of people splashing, playing, or just laying around in the water. Some of them are on padded benches dozing near the water, some of them on floaty things in the water, and a lot of them appear to have drinks.

And… not much else. But not, like the lake at their settlement, naked. The women all have little skirts and breast bands, and the men are wearing some sort of shorts. They look silly to her. Once they’re wet, they might as well not have them on, especially the men, those shorts go tight and translucent once they get out of the water. Putting clothing on your skin to get wet seems like it’s not terribly comfortable to Rey, but… Local customs vary, apparently.

“I don’t have… a swimming costume.”

“That’s not a problem. If you stick to the private areas, no one cares if you’re naked or not. And if you’d like to join in these pools, just let one of the ladies know, and she’ll get you a swim dress.” 

Rey’s sure they’d be happy to get her a closet full of swim dresses if she asked.

Unni’s leading her down one of the paths away from the pools. “Down here are the private areas.” Rey notices the green plants form a sort of hedge, almost like a hallway, and as they walk, she notices that there are breaks in the hedges, fluttery curtains blocking the view of whatever’s happening in those areas. She also doesn’t hear anything from inside of those ‘rooms,’ so it’s likely there’s some sort of sound damping field, too.

They get to one that doesn’t have a closed curtain across it. The break in the hedge opens to a space surrounded by the green hedge. Inside, padded benches and tables, in white and cream colors, and a bit further off, past the structure, there’s a pool/lounging area.

“Over here, the pools are hot. The main ones range from cold to warm, but these here are for soaking more than swimming,” Unni says, looking at the pool in this area.

“So, people come here, and get a soak, and…” Rey’s looking at the benches, pillows, and padded tables… “Nap?”

“You could do that here. Most people who come here though opt for some sort of massage. The four-handed hot stone is very popular. Women often get their nails done. We have skin treatments. Eyebrow tinting, though yours are a gorgeous color, so I wouldn’t mess with them. We’ve got hair and makeup people.”

Rey’s fairly sure she knows what all of those words mean, but she’s not even remotely sure that she has any idea of what they _mean._

“Done, how…”

Unni stares at her, and apparently decides that Rey’s lack of cosmetics isn’t so much a fashion choice as the limits of what she knows.

She shows Rey her finger and toenails. “The manicurist shapes them, and puts a lacquer on them so they’re shiny. You can pick any color you like. Most women match their nails to their saree.” She very lightly touches her eyelashes. “My lashes, skin, the dark around my eyes. We have people who will do that for you.” She strokes her hair. “Unlike your husband’s pretty waves, mine required time and work. We have people who will do that for you, if you like.”

Rey remembers getting dressed up for Finn and Rose’s wedding. She remembers them on the beach, trading clothing, and cosmetics and perfumes. Making do with what they had. She can remember Kaydel looking at her in her pink dress, grinning at it, and Leia braiding Rose’s hair, and how… different… good… bizarre… it had felt to do that.

To take the time to go out of their way to be _pretty._

And it’s occurring to her, that pretty might not be anything Kylo’s ever wanted for himself, he certainly seems to respond favorably for it on her, so…

“Okay.”

“Okay?” Unni looks surprised. That was vastly easier than she was expecting.

“Sure. Let’s try it all. If I say stop, they’ll stop, right?”

“Of course.”

“Then set it up.”

 

 

* * *

Kylo’s been back in their “room” for a few minutes when the tailor, Mr. Atherson, comes in. He doesn’t much put Kylo in mind of Jon, though he was, to a degree, hoping he would.

This is much more businesslike.

Which he supposes makes sense. After all, this man is making him clothing, not designing the look of an empire for him. And, at least today, he’s just a guy whose wife bet well, not the leader of what’s currently the largest military faction in the galaxy.

Atherson has a collection of sketches. Different kinds of suits. They all look more or less the same to Kylo. He’s not attuned enough to care if there’s a scarf that goes over the coat, or if the cuffs on the trousers are five or nine centimeters wide.

“I just want what I’m wearing in a dark color.”

Atherson purses his lips, looks at his book of fabrics and shows Kylo what he’d call light blue.

“Green. I like green.”

“I have green.”

And a moment later Kylo’s looking at leaf, aqua, jade, opal, lime, avocado, chartreuse, and a few others he doesn’t know the name of, but none of them are dark.

“Darker.”

Atherson grudgingly pulls out another book of fabrics and whips out some colors that are indeed darker, in the sense of not being pastels, but they’re also neons. He’d rather scratch his eyes out than wear any of those.

“Dark… Like black, navy, midnight blue, forest green… Not… intense.”

Atherson comes up with a light jade green with a passable forest green print.

“Better.” Kylo touches the dark green of the print. “How about this?”

The next color is forest green, with a lot of white dumped in it. It’s… whatever you’d call pink, if it were green and white instead of red and white. Kylo can’t imagine how what he’s talking about isn’t clear. There’s just no possible way that dark green can be such an obscure concept. He stalks over to the bed, picks up the second to the darkest pillow, deep, royal purple, and says, “This! In green!”

The tailor winces. “Perhaps I could interest you in a nice deep leaf green?” He shows Kylo a swatch of fabric.

Kylo’s looking at something he’d call, if he were feeling generous, medium green.

“Only if you dip it in black dye for a few moments.”

The tailor’s eyes narrow. “I don’t think I’ll be able to accommodate you, sir.”

There are waves of frustration coming off the tailor, and Kylo can’t quite get into _why._ He just wants a suit in a color that’s not on the pastel wheel. How hard can that be?

“Look, I know there are dark-colored fabrics on this planet. I just bought my wife three sarees in a collection of nice, dark colors. Take some of that and make me a suit out of it. What’s the problem?” he adds some Force to his voice, tired of dancing around this.

The tailor winces again. “I am not making a dark suit. I won’t have my name on… something like that.”

Okay, Kylo knows he’s hitting some sort of local taboo, but not what. “Why in the name of the Force not?”

Atherson blushes, looking like he won't speak, but after a second he bites out, “If I make you a suit in a color like that, I’m letting you walk out of here looking like a whore trolling for cock.”

Kylo’s fairly certain by cock the man doesn’t mean roosters, but other than that obvious linguistic mismatch, he’s doing okay at understanding the idea behind the words. He swallows and licks his lips and decides that maybe he doesn’t need a dark suit.

“Exactly. Only one kind of man wears a dark suit here. Unless you want to be propositioned, constantly, which is not going to make for a nice night out with your _wife_ , find a light color! With your coloring, you’ll look better in cooler colors than warmer ones. I’ve got a violet that would bring out your eyes. A periwinkle that would look amazing on you. That green,” he points out the spring one with the forest print on it, “would look great. A dove gray--”

“You’ve got gray?” He can do gray.

“I’ve got gray.” He flips through the swatches, and there’s a dove gray with a subtle silver pattern on it. Kylo’d prefer something closer to charcoal, but he’s fairly certain this is as dark as it’s going to get, so…

“There. That. I can wear that.”

The tailor sighs in relief. “Excellent choice.”

Kylo sags a bit, also feeling relieved at not having to face a night in something called periwinkle. He’s not even entirely sure what periwinkle may be, but just the name alone sets him on edge. He thinks for another moment. “I keep seeing men in pink, gold, and green, does that mean something?”

The tailor smirks a little. “Hangers on. Prince Rasilee likes that combination, and many men would chose to look like him.”

“Anyone important favor gray?”

“No. Most men prefer vibrant colors to subdued ones.”

“Any other messages gray may be sending?”

Atherson’s voice is dry when he says, “Just a dislike of the colorwheel.”

“I can live with that.”

“Noted. Let’s get you measured.”

 

 

* * *

Once he’s got a color, the rest of getting a suit set is quick.

For Kylo at least. He’s just got to stand there and get measured, and ignore the tailor thinking about how anyone could possibly be this size and what his parents must have been feeding him to get him this tall.

When he’s done, he focuses on Rey, wondering how her adventures are going.

He doesn’t get any words from her, but there’s a very content, lazy, pleasurable sensation coming from her right now, and after fussing over suit colors, he’s thinking he could use some of whatever’s making her feel that way.

She catches that from him and he feels _Yes, come find me, you’ll like this_ a moment later.

 

 

* * *

At the front desk, they find Unni for him, and in a minute, when he asks about joining Rey, she grins at him, makes a call, and then leads him up to the roof.

In the elevator, he can feel her really looking at him.

 _Really_ looking.

The spell hasn’t broken, but she’s cracking it. Too smart, too attentive, her job is reading people and making them _want_ things. He’s got to mind wipe her or figure out how to play her, fast.

“It’s the scar,” he says, with a big, stupid smile, trying to look as unimposing as possible while gesturing at it. He can feel the ghost of Han beaming at him for trying this. “The height and hair doesn’t help, but Rey just about hit me when I talked about cutting it off, so I can’t really change it, but really it’s the scar. People didn’t used to look at me like this, and wonder if I was him, until I got the scar.”

He feels her relax. “Oh. I…”

He shakes his head. “No worries. It happens often enough. Sometimes, if I’m looking to get ahead in a line or get someone to pay attention to me, it’s useful.”

She smirks at that. They’re quiet for a floor, and then she says, “Do you mind if I ask how you got it?”

He rolls his eyes a little. “Speeder accident. Cut a turn too close, and it took it out on my face.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. I could have done without that.”

She smiles at him. “And what do you do when you’re not speeding about, Mr. Amidala?”

Uh… “Rey and I run a school.” He shrugs a little. “Actually, she runs it. I scout for students.”

“What kind of school?” she asks, looking up at him. 

“You familiar with the Church of the Force?”

“I know it exists. Not a lot of interest in that here. We’re mostly Concordance of the Stars, here.”

He doesn’t know that faith, but that doesn’t bother him. She doesn’t know his, and she doesn’t seem fussed by that, so they’re good.

“We run a version of it. The Order of the Maji,” and saying that, he _really_ likes it. Feels like he just tripped into something important, something that will matter. “It’s an offshoot of the Church of the Force. Small now, but growing.”

She nods. “Are you Jedi?”

“No! _The Jedi are dead._ ” He hadn’t realized he was setting up that trap until he walked into it, so he shuts it down, fast and hard.

Her eyes go blank for a moment. “The Jedi are dead. Of course. I’d heard that.” The elevator opens, and they step out onto the roof.

He looks around, approving of the pools, imagining that right now a bit of a soak would be good, and the shorts he’s got on under his suit look similar enough to what the other men are wearing, he’d probably fit in all right. Or not. His shorts are black. A quick glance through the guests shows him that none of the men have anything darker than what he’d call light blue.

The servers, male and female, are in black, and he does wonder a little, about that. But they were in black down in the casino, too, so…

“She’s back here, Mr. Amidala,” stops that train of thought.

 

 

* * *

 

Back here is apparently down some sort of hedge lined hallway, and then down another one, and ducking into a small “doorway” though he’s not sure if that’s the right word for an opening with a curtain to a—

And that’s where all awareness of any surroundings besides Rey go fully skittering out of Kylo’s mind.

 

 

She’s naked, lying on her stomach, hair gathered up by her shoulder, on some sort of padded table, and there are two women, very pretty women, with curly dark hair, and burnished teak skin, wearing long black skirts and breast bands and nothing else, one at her head, the other at her feet, rubbing some sort of satiny-glistening oil or something onto his wife.

His mouth has gone completely dry watching this. He’d swallow, hard, but he can’t.

The one at her head has her hands on Rey’s upper back, and she’s leaning forward, stretching her back, strong, soft hands caressing down her spine, and the one at her feet has both of her hands cupped around her calf, stroking up her leg, and at the sight of this all of Kylo’s higher level functions have completely shut down.

The only head doing any thinking is attached to Kylo’s shaft and it _really_ likes this. He’s just _standing_ there, watching those ladies pet his wife, his eyes wide, breath coming faster, totally unaware of anything besides how fucking _amazing_ this looks and how he’s _never_ going to forget this, and maybe if Rey were to flip over or…

That’s about when he notices the giggling in his head.

Apparently, him standing there like a mute, horny fool is amusing her to no end.

He blinks, and realizes a few things all at once.

A: Rey is thinking at him, _I take it you approve._

B: He is not wearing trouser with a snug leg. In fact, these trousers, and his shorts, are both rather loose, and made of a very light cotton and a very light silk. And, to make matters worse, his jacket is a very light silk, too. Meaning that part of him is standing tall and proud more than a few centimeters in front of the rest of him, because _nothing_ is keeping it snug to his body. He _quickly_ decides now’s a really good time to hold his hands in front of himself, and make sure his forearm is keeping his shaft pressed against his hip.

C: When he said _join_ Rey, he meant, go to where she is. Unni decided that he meant he’d like whatever it is they’re doing to her, which, well, he does, but… Anyway, this would be about the time he’s noticing that two other women have joined them, and they’re setting up a second one of those padded tables, and they expect him to take his clothing off, and get onto said table, and just let them… pet… him.

D: Rey, having followed this thought process has gone from amused in her head to outright laughing. She says, “Could we have a few minutes on our own?”

Unni says, “Of course, just hit the button when you want the girls to come back,” and all five of them shuffle out.

Rey’s got a huge grin on her face as she sits up, looking at him. She’s still giggling.

 _It’s not funny._ He thinks at her, sitting down next to her, slipping her leg over his.

 

 

She’s grinning at him. _Feels that way to me._

He rolls his eyes and kisses her shoulder, feeling the slip of her oiled skin against his lips, and this close he can smell the sweet perfume of it. He knows there’s vanilla and ginger in whatever they’re rubbing on her, but there’s also a woody note, and some floral, neither of which he can identify.

He wants to eat her. Lay his lips and tongue on every inch of her skin. Rub his body all over hers. He wants to watch those ladies do that, too. He could lay there, stroking himself, watching them rub all over Rey… Not enough to spurt, just to… enjoy it… Maybe… If they… do what he thinks they do… he probably could… If Rey was okay with it, and… But if he’s not right about what they do…

_Are they pleasure specialists?_

Her eyebrows furrow. _Kylo?_

 _Whores?_ He’s not sure what the term would have been in Jakku for what he’s talking about, but that one’s pretty common. And, obviously, if the codes are so well established that Atherson wouldn’t make him a dark suit… And they’re wearing black, so… _What services are on offer?_

This would be the moment where it occurs to Rey that maybe more than just getting the kinks worked out of her back is on offer and that brings her up short. _Uh…_

_Oh, now you don’t think it’s so funny, do you?_

_I… don’t know. Four-handed hot stone massage. They started with the stones and then moved onto hands and…_ She licks her lips. This is suddenly a lot less funny, because talk about possibly misreading a situation. _Uh… Do they… work with women?_

_The ones the Order hire do._

_They do?_ And there’s an idea that never occurred to Rey.

_Yes. They work with anyone who wants to relax and/or feel good._

_Why do you know this?_

He’s looking at her curiously as he thinks, _I’m fairly sure we’ve been over you not being the first woman I’ve had sex with. And I know I’ve thought about how most of the women I’ve slept with didn’t much care if it was any good for them._

Rey blinks. _Oh._

_I_ _s that a problem?_

_Uh… No… I just… Didn’t put that together._

_Okay. So… What do you want to do? Because, honestly, if you like, I’d very happily lay here, watch, stroke myself to it, and then fuck you through that table when they’re done._

 

 

Those words make her shiver. She can see it, him on his side, eyes hot and on her, fingers ghosting over his shaft, giving himself little squeezes now and again. She can see it here, now, real, the way he’s watching her, the way his hand is lightly stroking up and down her back, the not even remotely subtle bulge in his trousers, because part of him _really_ likes the idea of this.

Thinking about it, _really_ thinking about it… Rey licks her lips. The ladies working on her are very pretty. The ones who were setting up the table for Kylo were, too… So… She can see him laid out, skin glistening, two gorgeous women rubbing all over him… She’s starting to breathe a little faster, too.

_And if I want to see them rub you?_

He smiles at that idea, having followed the images in her mind. He’s not at all troubled by laying out and letting Rey enjoy watching him get petted. _I’m not averse to getting rubbed on, assuming that’s um... part of the service. If they’re just massage techs… I still wouldn’t mind. I just don’t want to… make things uncomfortable._

_Is there a discreet way to ask this?_

“I don’t think so.” He shifts around a little, tucking himself in as well as he can, and Rey reaches for that button. “Unni, can we talk to you?”

“Certainly,” and a moment later she’s back.

Rey looks to Kylo, who’s looking back at her. _You’re the one who’s done this before, you ask._

He doesn’t roll his eyes. “Just… so we understand…” he winces a little, “but… what’s considered _appropriate_ behavior here?” He hopes that’s specific enough.

Unni’s looking amused, too. “The girls can touch you. You don’t get to touch them. They won’t touch your genitals, lips, or nipples. Other than that, you can negotiate _anything_ you may want. Just remember to tip _well_ for service above and beyond. And no one cares what you do with each other when they aren’t in the room.”

Rey and Kylo nod. “Okay,” Rey says.

“Any other questions?” Unni asks.

“Not right now,” Kylo responds. Though, after a second, the finds himself thinking, that if they’re going to do _this_ they may as well _do_ it.

“A pitcher of those coconut lime drinks, just a little rum, put like… a quarter as much as you normally would in there, and if you’ve got some sort of treat sampler, like those little baskets of pickles and pastries from downstairs, bring them up.”

“We can do that. Do you want the ladies to come back in?”

Rey says it, “Yes.”

 _You sure?_ Kylo asks as Unni leaves, and he starts to undress.

_Yes. We’ll watch each other, relax, enjoy, and when they leave, that’s when the hands-on fun begins._

He smiles at that, kicking his sandals off into the corner of their… He supposes it’s kind of like a room, but he’s never been in one with living walls and no ceiling before.

A little less focused on Rey, he notices the soaking pool, and the pillows, and how this is designed to be a sensuous little nest. The colors are cool and light, and there are small glowy crystals in the pool adding a flickering glow to everything. Above them, he can see the sky darkening, pinking up along the left side. Twilight.

Naked, he pads over to the table that’s for him. It’s firm with some give in it, and the surface is some sort of smooth cloth. _Probably better if I’m lying on my belly._

_I can’t imagine you’re the only man walking proud in here._

He smirks a little at that as he lays down. _I’d imagine that’s true. But I’m a lot less likely to be tempted to touch myself if it’s_ under _me._

She grins at that. _Just save it for me. When we’re all soft and slippery, I’ll come over and touch it all you like._

He bites his lip. _Promise?_

 _Promise._ She’s lying on her belly, looking at him, eyes stroking up and down his body.

 _I might want you to touch it a lot._ He thinks with a grin.

She grins back. _Then it’s good for you that I like touching it a lot._

The ladies come back in just as she’s thinking that to him. They introduce themselves. The two working on Rey are Adra and Simmi. Coree and Leeth have him. Rey tells them that she’s Rey and he’s Ben, and he thinks his thanks to her for that. He prefers not introducing himself as Ben, even if that is the name he’s using here.

Leeth is at his head. She sets up a little cradle on the table for his face, so he can lay with his face down, and also takes the pitcher of drinks, and pours some into a bottle, attaches it to the table leg, and sets a straw so it’s near his lips. “That way you can sip as you like. The snacks should be up soon.” With his face in the cradle, he can’t see much of anything, and he wants to see, so he rests his face against the side, toward Rey.

Rey’s on her tummy, too, and she’s looking in his direction. The ladies who were working with her also set up a drink for her, and she takes a sip.

He has some of his own drink, and yes, this time there is rum, but he can feel there’s not a lot of it. They should be able to drink the whole pitcher and just feel warm and loose, not ready to die the next morning.

Speaking of warm and loose, he can hear the ladies behind him doing something, and then there’s are two warm hands on his shoulders and two on his feet and they’re slick and that oil that smells so good is being spread across his back and he groans, loud, at the feel of it.

 

 

“Has it been a while since someone’s done this for you?” Coree asks.

“Yeah.” His spine pops in half a dozen places as Leeth presses down and glides her hands down it.

“Make sure we get a bottle of the oil delivered to our room,” Rey says, as she thinks _How long?_

_Five, six years._

_So, not just sex?_

_Once. Kammun, one of my knights…_ He backs up _I’d let it build up until I just couldn’t take it anymore, then spurt my spurt as hard and fast as I could, and leave it alone until I couldn’t anymore. Kammun pointed out I was even more of a bastard than normal the longer I went, and told me that with what I was doing I was missing the point._

 _So…_ Rey groans a little has her ladies start working on her hands. She had no idea her hands could even get tense, but this is just delicious, and that sound just _lodges_ in Kylo’s shaft. He wants to hear her make sounds like that, a lot. He’s watching what they’re doing, carefully, intending to do this to Rey again at some point. _Did you get the point?_

_Maybe. Got more of it than I had before. Not as much as I’ve gotten with you._

She smiles at that, and his brain goes blank for a bit because the hot stone thing, which he knows he heard, but didn’t grasp, is coming into play, and they’re rubbing these, slick, hard, hot stones against his back and shoulders and calves and thighs and _Holy FORCE_ that’s… no words for that, but he damn well is going to find out if there’s anyone on the _Supremacy_ who does this because he _really_ wouldn’t mind it happening again.

With the exception of his bones and shaft, the rest of him is melting into a very content puddle of goo on the table.

He notices his eyes drifted shut, so he could focus on hot and slippery on his skin, and they drift open again, watching as the ladies work on Rey’s upper arms, kneading and stroking, and yes, soft, strong fingers rubbing all over Rey as someone else rubs all over him is making him feel good on pretty much every level of good he can feel.

 _Why only once?_ Rey thinks to him.

 _Didn’t care if I was a bastard after, and doing something he recommended to me didn’t feel right after I lost him._ That’s darker than either of them would like for this.

They’re laying stones on his spine, and his hips, across his shoulders and down his arms, and he feels pressed into the table with a good, strong stable energy. _What do you think these rocks are?_

_Not kyber._

He can feel that, but there’s a really nice, low buzz to them. _Nope._ “What sort of stones are these?”

“Smoothed obsidian,” Leeth says.

“Volcano glass.” Arda adds. “If you break it, it’ll shatter into the sharpest blade imaginable, but shaped like this, it’s perfectly smooth. And it holds heat like nothing else.”

“You’ve got a lot of scars,” Corree says, “is there anything we need to know before we get into this?”

He shakes his head, taking another sip of the drink. “Speeder accident a year ago. I’ve still got marks, but everything else is pretty much back together. You can do whatever you like.”

_Speeder accident?_

_Unni’s too observant. The spell was failing, so I told her that it was the scar that made me look like him. My hair and coloring didn’t help, but ever since I got in the speeder accident, people have stared and wondered._

_Good story._

_Thanks. She seemed to believe it._ “OH!”

“Too hard?” Coree asks.

“No, just… oh!” She’s got his foot and is doing… something… involving some traction, and a small stone, and he’s got a sort of rippling sensation spreading from his ankle to his hip and… Really, he’s got to find people who know how to do this because he can feel how doing something like this regularly is likely going to be very good for both of them.

“You’re really tight, you know that?” Leeth says.

“I’m getting that sense,” Kylo replies, paying attention to his body in a way he hasn’t since… Since training to be a Jedi, when part of his meditations and letting go was also supposed to be about letting go of physical tension.

“High-stress job?” Coree asks.

Rey doesn’t laugh out loud at that, and Kylo appreciates that.

“Unni says you’re a teacher,” Leeth says.

“She’s the teacher. I find students.”

“Oh.”

_I’m a teacher?_

_Aren’t you?_

“Rey, how about you flip over, and we can get to your front,” Arda says.

And Rey does.

And that’s when any thoughts of anything besides watching them go galloping out of Kylo’s head.

 

 

* * *

A properly trained master is _patient._

There weren’t a whole lot of things Luke and Snoke would have agreed on, but that was one of them.

Now, it is true that neither of his masters were ever particularly impressed when it came to Kylo’s patience skills.

But, it’s also true that he’s got something he’s _enjoying_ waiting for right now.

A lot.

So, yes, there’s a part of him, a very insistent, hot, heavy, full part of him. One that’s offering a dull throb with each of his heartbeats, laying under him, urging him to _not_ be patient.

And, yes, in different circumstances, he could very easily see taking said part in hand, and making it awfully happy, but… still… patience. Even if he were lying on his side, stroking himself, he’d just be _enjoying_ it. After all, there’s something a _lot_ better than his hand here, assuming he’s willing to wait.

And he is.

Plus, by waiting he gets to watch the best show he’s ever seen, bar none. It’s not something that’s ever occurred to him before, but now that it has… He’s never going to turn down getting to watch beautiful women rub Rey. Nope. Never.

She’s on her back, watching him, keeping up eye contact, skin flushed pink, gleaming golden in the soft light of the little glowy crystals. There’s a line of those black stones down her torso and her legs, and the ladies keep _rubbing_ her, and one of them is working on her chest, getting her pectorals, the other at her feet, and Kylo hasn’t closed his eyes, or started rocking his hips against his bench but…

He feels caught between two poles of want. He doesn’t want this show to end. He does want to get Rey alone, so he can get on that bench with her, and rub and glide his body all over, and in, hers.

Rey’s smiling at him. She likes this game, too. Likes the visuals, both how he’s seeing her, and watching him, laid out, cool white skin lit up golden, the contrast of his skin and the hands of the ladies working on him, his eyes heavy lidded, his body relaxed and his mind tense, wanting…

She licks her lips, filling him with images of her lips on all of his different body parts, and he grits his teeth, staving off his need, his want, staying here, between the poles, enjoying the different pulls.

The lady… Simmi, who was working on Rey’s top side, leans down and kisses her forehead. Kylo’s very proud of himself that he does not, in fact, choke seeing that, because speaking of things he’s never thought of before, but now that he is… there are a _lot_ of places Simmi could kiss, and holy fuck does he want to see _all_ of them, but… Not part of the game. She gently presses down on Rey’s shoulders. Arda, is removing the stones from Rey’s skin.

“Okay, Rey, we’re done. Would you like a blanket?”

“No. I’m fine.” She rolls onto her side, settling in to relax and watch Kylo.

 

 

* * *

Rey doesn’t touch herself. That wouldn’t be playing by the rules of the game.

She does fill his mind with images of her touching herself. With her fingers playing all over her body as he lays there, watching, eyes half-closed, two women rubbing his back and arms and legs.

She’s not sure what they think of this, but Kylo’s apparently an extremely vocal massage client, who appears to be enjoying the hell out of this.

Or maybe they’ve worked with enough couples to get a sense of what’s going on, if not all the layers.

He refuses to rub himself against the bench, but sometimes, when they rub up his back, or put their hands on his hips and press down, he gets an extra bit of friction, and his eyes will drift shut, teeth gritting, as the feel of it rocks through him.

Rey grins at him, enjoying that look, adding more images to his mind, delighting in keeping him suspended between want and need.

 

 

* * *

Speaking of things that had never occurred to Kylo, the idea that he’d particularly like getting his butt rubbed is exactly _nowhere_ on the list.

Or that was true until two minutes ago.

Now, he can’t for the life of him imagine why he and Rey haven’t done this to each other before, and a whole lot. This feels good on levels he never imagined. It’s making his back and legs let go of tension he didn’t know they had, and his shaft is flushing, more than he thought it could, at the feel of this, and this _really_ needs to join their regular playtime.

Rey catches what he’s thinking and how much he’s enjoying what the ladies are doing to him, and she adds a bright and happy image of him kneading his fingers into her butt, grabbing each cheek, giving it a good, firm squeeze, filling his head with what he’d be able to see in that position, and then adding his mouth to the mix, licking and kissing and…

He bites his lip. _I haven’t spurted rubbing off on a mattress in more than a year, and I’m not about to do it now._

Rey smirks. _But you want to, don’t you?_

_Holy fucking Force, YES!_

 

* * *

“Ben, you want to flip over?” Leeth asks, voice soft. She knows he’s not asleep because his eyes are open.

He’s utterly unaware of her question, because, well, he doesn’t actually answer to the name of Ben, and he’s not paying any attention.

“Ben…”

Still utterly unaware.

“Mr. Amidala?”

Clueless, though he’s vaguely starting to wonder why they’re not rubbing his back quite so much.

_Kylo._

_Right! Uh…_

_Flip over?_

He blinks, looking up at Leeth. “No, thanks, I’m good.”

He’s not about to roll over. Yes, he’s likely not the only man to be standing proud here, but that doesn’t mean he needs to have his shaft standing up and looking the ladies in the eye. Plus, he’s sure that if they start rubbing the front of him, it’ll be doing more than just standing there.

Or he will. He’s having a much easier time _not_ doing anything he shouldn’t because he pretty much can’t.

_So… What did you mean more than a year?_

_Uh…_ It’s a fairly fuzzy memory at this point because he was mostly asleep when it happened but… _One of the almost dreams between us. We were fucking in the pool. You spurted; I didn’t. I woke up, couldn’t get my hand down my pants fast enough, so I flipped over and took care of it that way._

He lets her feel how desperate he was, tangled tight in his sleep pants and the blankets, rubbing hard and fast against his tummy and the mattress.

 _No dreams tonight. Just you and me and slick skin gliding all over each other._ Rey’s voice bright, eager in his mind.

He grins at her.

 

 

She sends him a bright, vibrant image of him rolled over, leaning back on his elbows so he can see everything she’s doing, shaft hard and slick, and her sitting between his legs, her legs over his, perfect, unobstructed view of her delta, one hand wrapped around his shaft, the other one gently caressing his stones.

Fortunately, the ladies assume he’s whimpering because they’re getting a tight, sensitive spot in his shoulder. “Did you do any physical therapy after your accident, Mr. Amidala? There’s a lot of scar tissue in here.”

“Not as much as I should have,” he chokes out. Giving himself an entire three hours to heal up followed by a massive flight battle, almost two full days of existential crisis, and then fighting for his life against the Praetorians counts as physical therapy, right?

Rey sniggers at that thought.

Leeth gets her fingers and one of the stones into a knot under his scapula, and this time he’s whimpering because of what she’s doing.

“Yeah, this shoulder blade is almost glued to your ribs. Here.” She takes his hand, folds it onto his back, so she can get further under his shoulder blade.

He chokes again. This is not pleasant. He can feel that he likely _needs_ it, but it _hurts._

And, he’d have thought that having someone stab him in the shoulder with fingers and a rock would distract him from the dull pulse of his shaft under him, but… It’s not. It’s really not. If anything the endorphins are making him harder. Every time Leeth hits one of those really sensitive spots, he feels himself throb.

Rey’s watching him, and he can feel she’s drifted away from what’s going on under him to what Leeth is doing. Light side healer instincts, apparently. “Can I join in?”

The ladies make room for her, and she hops onto the table, straddling his hips, and rests her hands on his low back. He can tell what she’s doing, unpicking the knots in his Force, and the ladies are unpicking the knots in his shoulder, and he’s biting his lip, hard, trying to keep himself under control, because he can feel this huge wave of building tension and is afraid that when it releases _all_ of it’s going to blow at once.

_Let it, Kylo._

_If I spurt all over this table, it’s on you._

_If you spurt all over the table, I’ll help you clean it up. Then you can lick me until you’re hard again, and I’ll ride you all night long._

Okay, he’s really not whimpering about what they’re doing to his shoulder.

He can feel Rey’s hands on his sacrum, gently pressing. Each of the ladies has one of his shoulders and he really hopes that if more than his shoulder gives on this, they don’t figure out what just happened.

He closes his eyes and lets himself relax into it. He can feel Rey’s energy thrumming about through his, moving to those tight, stuck places, worming in to unstick them. He’s trying not to fight it, but some of those bits have been stuck for almost a decade, the ones in his head and Force likely longer, the ones in his shoulder date back to when he broke his shoulder in a fight with the Knights, and her running a lightsaber through that shoulder certainly didn’t make the situation any better.

It does feel a bit like an oncoming spurt, but from Rey’s side. He generally just barrels on into them. Or tries to push getting there off. He’s more than familiar with the sense of building tension, of seeking a goal, but the centimeter beyond his grasp, almost there, so close, can’t quite… almost… just… sensation, that’s more of a her thing than a him thing.

But this is close. He wants it but doesn’t, and his body isn’t sure about how to get there, how to let go into it, and maybe part of it is being a little afraid that he’ll spurt when he lets go, but…

He breathes, deep and slow, finds Rey’s energy, meets it with his own, and follows her into those tight, dark, sluggish spots, breathing new life and energy into them. He can feel the spots in his shoulder that just sort of froze together, and he wonders what this is going to do for his fight, because there’s no possible way he won’t have more range of motion in his left arm when this is done, and that’s avoiding things, putting a bit more distance between him and the swell of tension/need/motion/release… he’s not sure what the word would be, what this feeling is, just that he needs to surrender to it.

_Let go, love_

And he does. And it crashes on and through him, and he’s not sure if he spurts or not, because he can feel it through his whole body, this almost shuddering, definitely electric shift, pulsing through his fingers and toes, centered on his shoulder and radiating out, and then he’s sort of half aware of everything going very quiet for a moment followed by some panicked sounds, and shit… he opens one eye, notices everything is black.

He blew the power.

But, he rocks his hips a little, didn’t spurt. He’s smugly pleased by that.

His shoulder’s feeling awfully good. Come to think of it so is his hip, and the other shoulder, and that tight bit right under his ribs, where Chewie got him with the bowcaster, and… Actually, something pretty serious just shifted for him, and he’s feeling really good in a _now would be a really great time to get a nap_ sort of way.

Except, he didn’t spurt, so there’s still this very intense and needy sensation under him.

 _Just a bit tense, were you?_ Rey’s thinking to him, amused, as the massage ladies tell them to stay put, and they’ll be back in a little bit, once they find out what happened.

They’ve only been out of the room for a few seconds when the power comes back up.

 _Did you do that?_ He thinks to Rey.

 _I think they just fixed it._ She lays out on top of him, her head on his shoulder, her arms around his sides. _Feeling good?_

 

__

 

 _I_ really _am. How’s it feel to you?_

_Soft and warm and glowy._

_Yeah._

“Are you two…” They hear Leeth’s voice as she steps in, “I’m going to guess you’re done.”

Rey lifts her head off of Kylo’s shoulder. “Yeah, we are. Thanks.”

“No problem. I’m sorry about the power. It’s normally rock solid, but today it’s just been off. They tell me the physical plant guy is stumped. Everything looks normal, but something just overloaded the system.”

Rey can feel Kylo smirking under her, face turned away from Leeth.

“It happens.”

“Okay, we’re just going to grab the stones, and tidy up a little, then head out.”

Rey rests on Kylo, feeling the soft rise fall of his breath under her, and the smoother, less tangled flow of his Force. There are still some dark, twisty knots in there, but not as many of them.

As she slides along through him, she gets another sense. There are fewer dark, tangled spots. That’s what she noticed the first time she did this, knots of sluggish, dark energy, tight, unable to move or flow. There are just as many dark spots now, but a bunch of them have unknotted.

She brushes his hair to the side and kisses the back of his neck, noticing the ladies leave the room. _The problem wasn’t the dark, it was the gnarled scars and fresh wounds._

He’d been following her train of thought well enough to know what she’s feeling.  

She’s on his back, and he doesn’t feel enough like moving yet to flip over or give her a hug, so he wraps her in his Force, letting it cuddle around her. She purrs at it, feeling warm and secure, enclosed in the embrace of his power if not arms, a soft, wet thrill echoing through her.

And he feels that thrill, feels the slick need of it, and remembers he’s not the only one with some unresolved tension.

 _Right._ She feels herself hovering above him by a few centimeters, and Kylo rolls over.

“Hi,” he says, nose to nose with her.

She smiles a little. “No cleaning necessary?”

He rocks his hips against her, and yes, he’s slick at the tip, couldn’t watch and feel all of that without some leaking, but he’s not _done._

 _Not yet._ His hand trails down her back, settling between her legs, feeling her slick, too. _Hoping to get messy with you._

She grins at him, then kisses his lips, first the top one, then the bottom, sucking lightly on it.

“Mmmm…” purrs out of him.

Her own purr joins his as she rocks against him, her slick gliding over his.

He bites his lower lip, inhaling, hard. All of the images from earlier cascading through is mind, he wants all of them, and, more urgently, wants her to shift forward just a bit so he can… “Unh!” shudders out from between his lips.

She did it, slipping him in.

_Thought you wanted me sucking you._

She sits up, riding him. _Been waiting too long. Just want you in me._

_YES!_

Slow and gentle and exploring and the rest of that… Tomorrow, or later, or…

Her hands are on his chest as she starts to raise and lower herself on him. He whimpers, relishing the friction, the all over wash of _finally_ getting her body on his to go with all of those mental images. He grabs her hips, clenching his teeth at how good this feels. A different tension is building now, and this one is cresting fast. None of this three centimeters away stuff, he’s hurtling toward this wave, submerged fully in it, in her, both of their hips moving fast, his feet on the padded table, giving him more power, more depth.

 

 

She leans back, back against his thighs, and his thumb finds her pearl. He’s too close to his edge; muscles drawn too tight. His fine motor control is too shot to do anything but keep his hand steady, give her something to grind against, but it’s enough. Between riding his arousal, her own, and his hand, it’s _enough._

His hips are snapping up at her, and she’s bouncing, grinding down on him. Both of them moving fast, hard, burning. Now there’s just _need._ There’s wet glide, and heat, and tight, and stretch, and a fast, glowing, shuddering _burst_ of pulsing dark light.

She falls forward onto his chest, and he falls back, laying against the table, legs splayed, muscles utterly limp.

Eventually, they catch their breath, and heartbeats slow down, and Rey’s kissing his collarbone as he strokes her back.

“Playtime good?” He probably could have come up with a more eloquent sentence if he’d waited longer, but that gets the idea across.

“Liking it so far,” she replies.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, every time I brush up against this, I get questions/comments, so...
> 
> How does the guy who just about has a panic attack when a strange woman flirts with him happily go fantasizing away about his wife with a bunch of other women?
> 
> Because for Kylo desire is dangerous territory when it's combined with manipulation. He doesn't like wanting when he knows it's being used against him. But right here, right now, he's just a guy having a *very* good time with his wife. No one's flashing boobs in the Master's face looking for a political edge here. (Maybe for good tips, but that's not the sort of thing that would bother him.)
> 
> And, of course, *with* his wife is the second part of this equation. This is something he's enjoying with Rey, who's also having a blast. If he were on his own, this would be significantly more stressful and a whole lot less fun for him.
> 
> I don't write demisexual Kylo Ren, who's only hot for Rey. My Kylo *likes* women. A lot. And, if he'd been Ben Solo, of Solo & Son Shipping, he probably would have very happily gone off and enjoyed a whole bunch of them in a lot of different ways. But, that's not the past he got to have. Likewise, he was not raised in a culture that attached any particular significance or value to monogamy. He was supposed to be celibate or near enough to not matter. Since sex isn't forbidden to Jedi, but *attachments* are, I'm fairly sure monogamy would be forbidden to them. Dangerous territory too close to the dark side and all that. 
> 
> That said, when I write his sexuality, him, on his own, with someone not Rey, is a flavor of non-monogamy that makes him distinctly uncomfortable. He's likely never really thought through it, but he knows they're matched, mated, balanced... however you want to think about it. The yin to his yang. And him, on his own, with someone else would throw that balance off in a way he really doesn't like.
> 
> But him and her, and the fantasy of others... That doesn't bug him at all. Because anything with both of them, together, having a good time, makes him happy. He'll fight with her, fuck with her, grieve with her, rule with her... any and all of it, because the balance is between the two of them, and when they're in balance, anything and everything else is in play. 
> 
> I don't think they'll ever go about making the idea of other people real, beyond say, having someone else help work the kinks out of sore muscles/watching someone else do that. But like the title says, this is playtime, and exploring fantasies is part of that.


	50. Fancy Lady

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little early this week. I've got guests tomorrow, and from the feel of it, a cold coming on, so... Let's bring on the good times.
> 
> Again, this chapter is REALLY FUCKING NOT SAFE FOR WORK. Like, seriously, it's on par with the last one if not slightly further past the bounds of NSFW.

The early part of their second day of Gidi Secundus is easy.

After glowing together, and getting a bit of a nap, and then a bit of a soak, they just meandered down to their room, and crashed. Travel, shopping, gambling, massage. It doesn’t seem like that should be tiring, but it was.

So, slow, easy, tired and lazy.

Waterbeds are… interesting. Different from the air mattresses they both have. Not bad, kind of… squishy… wiggly… different. Neither of them are thinking about rushing out to buy one as they drift off to sleep.

 

 

* * *

Morning. Light and red glow behind her eyelids.

Rey’s coming to the conclusion that, if she were to allow herself to, she might actually like being able to spend lazy mornings just drowsing with Kylo. Nothing to do, no need to move unless they want to.

But, eventually, even liking it, they hit the point of getting hungry, and wanting to see more of what’s out there. So, eventually, there’s getting up, getting dressed, (including fifteen minutes of both of them fighting with her saree. For as readily as she can put any sort of mechanical thing together, fabric and pins do not appear to follow that pattern. They get her into it, eventually. And then spend a moment staring at it, absolutely certain that _that’s_ not how it’s supposed to go together, and then do it again. And again. Third time was the charm. Finally all the bits were hanging properly.)

 

 

* * *

Getting himself dressed, Kylo feels different. His left shoulder doesn’t click when he pulls his arm across his chest, and he can actually pull his arm all the way across his chest. It’s been… well, since Rey put the saber through his shoulder since he could do that.

He walks across the room to his trousers, feeling how his gait has smoothed out some, and…

He smirks a little.

Rey raises an eyebrow at him, she’s dressed and ready to go. He’s musing and getting dressed very slowly. “I know that flavor of amusement. Something funny about sex.”

He smiles a little, picks up the trousers and walks back to the bed. Yep, he’s having a _much_ easier time, and his gait is a lot smoother.

“Uh… You asked about… Me visiting the Pleasure Specialists… And…” He’s in the middle of the story, and decides to back up. “I’m walking differently, right?”

Rey nods. “Yeah. That thing you do where you sort of lead with your left hip, I’m not seeing it.”

He sits down and starts to put on his trousers. “Okay. I’m noticing I’m walking differently after last night, and… Uh… I guess it was the second or third time I visited the Pleasure Specialists, and… One of them watched me walk in and thought, _He walks like he’s got a big shaft._ ” He smiles at that, and Rey gives him a little smirk and looks down. It’s just lounging around on his leg right now, waiting for him to pull up his shorts.

“Anyway. I caught the thought, probably blushed from my ears to my navel, and Kammon caught it, thought to me, _Wouldn’t want to disappoint her,_ so I didn’t pick her.”

Rey raises an eyebrow. “Uh…” She looks down. “It’s big, right?”

“It’s big in the sense I’m big. I’ve got two centimeters or three, _maybe_ four on most guys. But… I’m not enormous. I’m on the big side of normal, and she was looking at me like she expected me to be big the way Phasma was big, you know, HUGE, biggest guy in the ship, and I’m really not.”

Rey looks amused. “So, you went with someone else.”

“Yes.”

She’s looking up at him. “And… uh… now you don’t walk like a guy with a big shaft?”

“I never did. I was walking like someone who had his ankle and knee broken, and needed extra range of motion from his hip because the two joints below it never healed up right. Getting shot in the side didn’t exactly help with that, either.”

He stands up, pulls up his shorts and trousers, and takes a few more steps.

“Feels better?” Rey asks.

“Yeah. Even if women aren’t necessarily wondering how well-endowed I am when I wander into a room, now.”

She stands up, gives him a little shove, and then gently cups him through his trousers. A soft, gentle squeeze followed by her on her tip toes kissing “Big enough,” to his lips.

He smirks at that, kissing back, before breaking off to go find his jacket.

 

 

* * *

They’re at breakfast, sitting in front of a collection of fruits, yogurts, and flatbreads, when Unni comes to join them.

She doesn’t sit with them, but does look over the table. Both Kylo and Rey have a bit of everything mixed into a bowl, and the flatbread on the side. From there, they’re not entirely sure what to do next, because there don’t appear to be any utensils.

“You rip a small piece of the bread off, and then use it to scoop up the yogurt,” Unni says, and then looks at one of the breads, “May I?”

“Sure,” Rey says, watching as she pinches a small piece of bread between her fingers, and scoops up a bit of the fruit/yogurt mix. It’s a little drippy, but the basic concept seems to work.

“Normally, we eat the fruit on the side, with our fingers.”

That probably makes a certain amount of sense, they’re all bite-sized pieces, and like last night, some of them are sweet or savory pickles.

“So, what are your plans for the day? Can I arrange anything for you? Mrs. Amidala, you’ve still got appointments for hair and makeup later today, do you want to keep them?”

Kylo can feel Rey’s not exactly sure she wants to do that, but isn’t sure she wants to not do it, either.

“Been a long time since I’ve had a trim,” he runs his hand through his hair. “Could probably use to lose a few centimeters.”

Rey raises an eyebrow at him. _What’s a few?_

_Five, ten? It’s getting pretty shaggy. I won’t ask her to shave it off._

_Okay._

“I guess the hair is still on, if you can get him in, too.”

“We can do that.”

Kylo’s starting to get a plan for tonight. “You said there are shows here?”

“Several,” Unni replies. “What’s your preference, comedy, drama, or acrobatics?”

“Acrobatics,” Rey says.

That’s probably less plot than Kylo’d like, but he can deal with it. “Sounds good.”

“I can get you seats for that.”

“Dinner? What’s a romantic night here?” Kylo asks, remembering Dad and Lando talking about taking their ladies out. They certainly seemed to enjoy it, and he’s thinking that’d be a good plan for tonight.

Unni smiles at that. “I can get you set up.”

“Do it,” Kylo says with a smile.

 

 

* * *

It’s… bizarre… that’s probably the best word for it. Maybe, possibly, if she wants to dig deep enough into the memories hiding in her head, she can find a time when someone used to play with her hair. After all, it didn’t put itself into those buns.

But she doesn’t want to go there.

And it’s not that no one ever plays with her hair. Kylo will wash it when they’re in the shower together, and she loves that. His big, strong fingers rubbing shampoo through her hair, rubbing circles against her scalp. That’s just lovely.

But once they’re out, she rubs a little conditioner through it (stolen from him) and then combs it out, and pulls it back if she’s wearing it up, and that’s that.

This is really different.

And not unpleasant.

She doesn’t _not like it._ It’s just…intimate maybe. Opening… growing… in a direction she’s not used to.

Changing. She’s changing.

Literally.

The lady standing behind her, the very nice lady who is doing everything in her power to make Rey feel comfortable, has a pair of wickedly sharp scissors, and is cutting her hair.

She hasn’t cut her hair since she had to shave it all off to deal with the mites.

She prefers it longer, so the woman’s not taking a lot off, just ‘getting rid of the dead bits’ and ‘making sure it’s got some bounce and movement.’ Rey’s not sure what that last bit means, but… It doesn’t _hurt._ And Kylo’s getting his trimmed, too, so…

Okay, hair.

Hair is a thing, and it needs upkeep and… This is _normal._ It’s a thing people do. Rose gets her hair cut. Poe and Finn get theirs cut. People _do this_ all the time.

She can feel Kylo’s intentionally not letting his mind brush up against hers. He’s letting her be in her own head and figure this out on her own. Mostly. He’s lounging around, getting his hair washed, purring contentedly, like the big black maomao he is.

He’s not pressing her, he’s just… showing off that this is something pleasurable.

Showing off that this is something they can enjoy, and still be them.

Maybe.

It does feel nice.

 

 

* * *

And half an hour later, when the lady’s done drying her hair, it turns out that bounce and movement means it’s been cut so that falls softly around her face and shoulders. Her hair is still dark brown and but it's a bit less straight, and a lot less severe.

An hour after that, long after Kylo’s left to make sure his suit actually fits, it’s falling around her face in soft waves, and there’s a royal purple hibiscus tucked into her hair.

Rey doesn’t feel like herself.

She’s… pretty. Really pretty. Or, at least, that’s what the ladies playing with her keep saying. They’re talking about the color of the flower catching the greens in her eyes, and how her eyebrows are just so perfect and that it’s just not fair that they naturally grow that way, and then the cosmetic lady is there, and…

“Slow down,” Rey’s holding up both hands, really not sure about this. “It’s…”

“Too much. That’s okay. I’m Kelli, by the way,” the cosmetic lady says, extending her hand. “You don’t normally do this, do you?”

“No.” Rey looks at her hand, remembers the thing Kylo said about handshaking, and gently grasps it, and then lets go. Apparently that’s been done right, because Kelli smiles.

“Okay. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Fashion, our bodies, the choices we make about how we look, that’s all about making people see what we want them to, and hiding the things we don’t want them to see. So, what do you want people to see?”

Rey exhales, long and slow. That’s the question now, isn’t it?

 

 

* * *

Kylo’s standing in front of the mirror on the back of the bathroom door, eyeing a suit that he’s fairly sure is supposed to be gray. He can remember agreeing to gray. Gray with a subtle silver pattern. Okay, subtle silver is there, but…

“Is this white?”

“You’re colorblind, aren’t you?” Atherson sounds like having figured that out, that the rest of Kylo is making a lot more sense. “That’s gray. The official title on the fabric is chalk.”

“Chalk is white.”

“Uh huh.”

Kylo can feel the man think _colorblind._ At least the damn thing fits properly. Alas, since it’s a _white_ suit, and since it’s a thin silk designed to deal with this warm climate, Kylo’s very _black_ shorts show through both the trousers and the jacket.

“Is there a place here where I can get underthings?”

“Yes. Or you can give me an hour, and I can have some made. You’ll run into the same problem looking for shorts that you did with trousers. If they fit your waist they’ll be snug to your thigh, and if they fit your thighs, they’ll fall off your waist.”

“Fine. Make me some shorts that don’t show through.”

“I’ll send them up in an hour or so. Button on the fly?”

“Preferably, no.” At least, his current shorts don’t have anything like that. He can’t imagine it’s comfortable to have a button _there._

“How do you keep them closed?” Atherson sounds surprised.

“It’s never been an issue,” Kylo replies, dryly.

“Fabric preference?”

“Don’t care. Soft. Just, make sure they’re soft.”

Atherson has a smirk forming at that, and Kylo’s feeling a sense of trepidation at what might be coming his way, but… Worse comes to worst he goes without them. He’s fairly sure he’s not hairy enough for that to show through, but if it does, he can put his other trousers on.

 

 

* * *

“What do you want people to see?”

Rey’s still thinking about it. She’s agreed to let them do her toenails. If that’s too much, she can just put her boots back on, and the only person who’ll see them will be Kylo.

Again, like with her hair, this feels good. They’re rubbing her feet, and scrubbing them, and gently trimming her toenails, buffing them up, and…

It’s an objectively pleasant set of sensations. In fact, it never occurred to her until last night when the massage ladies were working on her feet that she might like having them rubbed, but at this point she’s coming to the conclusion that foot rubbing is a very good thing, and she’ll be quite pleased if it happens a lot.

And, as Kelli starts on her toenails, the royal purple with little copper sparks is really pretty. If it was on Rose, (okay, Kaydel. Rose likes pretty things, but she doesn’t tend to wear them on her person, because pretty things on her person tend to get broken. Between her job, and Paige, who right now locks onto pretty things like a grabby, little tractor beam, pretty things just don’t last on her.) she’d think it was really nice.

The floaty dresses on Naboo… What was she showing?

That she’s a woman and a wife. That there was a distinctly _female_ and distinctly _desirable_ part of herself. That her physical body exists, and its existence is pleasurable. Just by walking around. Just by being. That she was enjoying it. Enjoying trying this new thing out, and enjoying Kylo enjoying it.

She was enjoying being desired, publicly. It wasn’t just him seeing it, it was him seeing it in front of other people. So much of their life is hidden, and this was out in the open.

She was enjoying being his. Enjoying the marks on her skin, the ring on her finger, the feel of his arm around her. But again, not just those things, but doing them where others could see them. Not just being a wife, but being _his_ wife, and other people knowing it.

So, why is this different?

She knows why, the hair, the cosmetics, the clothing. Everything is finer. His suit. The ‘romantic evening.’

She’s not dressing up as his wife tonight. She’s dressing up as his Queen.

And maybe, if the potential for that being literally true weren’t here, this would be easier.

But it is. And eventually, there’ll be a decision she has to make. A moment where she’ll be acting, not reacting.

And this can be playtime, and she can dip a toe into it, see if she likes swimming in these waters, but… Even setting her toe in feels like a change. Even acknowledging there could be a change is a change.

A big one.

 

 

* * *

A dark man grabbed her hand and pulled her away from blaster fire, yelling at her to run.

An orange face told her there was nothing left for her, not back there.

Burning dark eyes and an extended glove begged her to come with him.

Change and change and change…

She couldn’t then. She didn’t need the man who wanted to burn the galaxy down. But the one who’s building it up…

He’s met her beyond halfway on this. Moving with her to the balance. Offered her pretty much everything she could have possibly asked of him, and then some.

But it’s still scary to be an illiterate desert rat faced with grandeur.

 

 

* * *

Okay, faced with what’s in the box he just opened, compared to what’s hanging on the hanger in his closet, Kylo can tell the difference between white and chalk.

These shorts are _white._

He’s seen freshly fallen snow that was dingier than these shorts. Staring directly at these things in full sunlight could cause eye damage. If there’s a supreme ideal of white, this is it.

He’s almost afraid to touch them, let alone put them on, sure he’ll smudge them somehow.

Then he rolls his eyes at himself. They’re undershorts, not some sort of art.

He pulls them out of the box and decides he may have been wrong about that. This is the softest, lightest, finest fabric he’s ever laid fingers on. It’s like touching the idea of silk. He wants to just sit here and pet them, reveling in the feel of the fabric between his fingers.

Then he realizes where he’s supposed to be wearing these. As in what parts of his body are going to be wrapped in this fabric, and he struck with the fear that he can’t walk around in these without getting hard.

If the point of undershorts is to keep him somewhat more discretely tucked into his pants than he would be without them, these shorts may have the exact opposite effect.

 

 

* * *

They’re really pretty.

Rey’s wiggling her toes, and the color shifts, royal purple with copper sparks, and then she shifts, and the light shifts, and now they’re copper with violet sparks, and wiggling makes them shift from color to color, and just on the edge of copper to purple there’s this line of… She doesn’t know the name of the color, just that she likes it.

“Okay, do my fingers.”

Kelli’s grinning at her. “See, this isn’t hard.”

It’s not, but…

Kylo’s mentioned that everything he’s good at, he worked for, trained, studied. A lot of the things she’s good at, she’s just good at. She picked it up and that was that.

And she doesn’t know how to do this.

It’s something she’d have to _learn._

“Come, fail with me.” _You need a teacher._

She’s never taken him up on that. Never let him teach her, because… That would mean admitting she doesn’t know how to do something. She’s been feeling her way through things he likely _could_ teach her. Only asking for help when she’d hit something she just _couldn’t_ figure on her own. And part of that, something she thinks that matters, is _not_ getting it the Jedi-approved way. Or the Snoke corrupted way. Part of it is starting fresh.

But part of it is not wanting to admit she doesn’t know how to do whatever it is.

 

 

* * *

He feels a little foolish walking around in just a pair of shorts, but… This is not the sort of thing he wants to be wrong about.

Yes, pump enough rum into him, and he comes to the conclusion that wandering about with his shaft leading the way is just fine.

He’s cold sober now, and intends to stay that way most of the night. (Though last night’s warm and loose was actually pretty nice. He may want to experiment with that again. Possibly even tonight, but that’s _later._ ) They’re going to dinner and a show. Very much not situations where he needs to be walking proud.

So, foolish he may feel doing this, but he’d rather be comfortable tonight, not looking for ways to twist himself into a position where his shaft isn’t leading the way.

Okay, yes, this feels awfully nice. He’s usually not really aware of his shorts. They’re just there. A barrier between him and the rougher fabric of his trousers. He can’t actually ever remember a time when he’s been consciously aware of them.

But he is now. This is soft and silky and rubbing against him in a really pleasant way with each step, but… It’s controllable. It’s _nice._ To some degree it puts him in mind of the way he fantasizes about Rey between meetings. It’s good, he enjoys it, but he doesn’t put enough into it to give him a lift.

He’s fairly sure he can ignore this easily enough, but, later on tonight, this should add an extra layer to whatever good things are coming.

He’s half-thinking of ordering some more of these for himself, but he’s also fairly sure Atherson won’t make him black ones, so…

Okay, no. He’s not asking Jon for silky undershorts. Just… no.

There are some things about him Jon just doesn’t need to know.

He does call down and order more of them from Atherson. And if he’s got white shorts, then he’s got white shorts. After all, not _everything_ has to be black.

 

 

* * *

“Toes done, fingers done, are we doing your face?” Kelli asks.

Rey’s certainly noticed a lot of the women hear are wearing some substantial makeup on their faces. Darkened lashes, and kohl rimmed eyes, and lips of red or plum.

The cosmetic ladies and the hairdressers also have intricate designs drawn across their foreheads and on their hands.

It’s not that it looks bad. She thinks most of the women around her are gorgeous. But… she can’t see it on herself. The finger and toenails are a stretch and covering her face with thick makeup…

“Can we do something… subtle?” she asks.

Kelli smiles. “Of course. Especially if you don’t wear makeup regularly, putting a lot of it on at once is more likely to make you feel self-conscious than pretty.” Kelli’s looking her up and down. “What are you wearing tonight?”

She’s been in a plush robe since they began this. She’d been somewhat loathe to take the saree off, but they promised that someone would help her get into it.

“It’s purple and copper, matches my toes.”

Kelli smiles at that, too. “And is your man with the pretty black hair coming down here to get you? Meeting you at the restaurant?”

“Uh… I was planning on going back to our room.”

She thinks about it. “Which room?”

“We’re in 1514. Why?”

Kelli replies, “Because the first time he sees you all dressed up, we want his brain to short circuit. We want his tongue to feel too big in his mouth, and his eyes to glaze over, and for everything in the world but you to cease to exist for him. So… We’ll get him out of the room for a bit, you go up, and then he comes to you.”

“He comes to me?”

“Of course. He’s a man. It’s his job to go to you.” Kelli says, “You wait for him. He comes to you. The other way around is… unseemly.” The ladies all seem to know this as some sort of fact. Rey assumes it’s some sort of cultural norm. That said, she doesn’t mind the idea of Kylo’s brain short circuiting. She’d certainly enjoyed when that happened last night. Watching that moment of him going utterly dumbstruck and then feeling his desire _spike_ , _hard_ was a treat. “If you were in one of the suites on the sixteenth floor, we’d shove him in the sitting room, and then he could go to you from there. Since you’re on fifteen, we’ll get him out of the room for a bit.”

“Okay… So, what’s subtle look like?”

 

 

* * *

Shorts sorted, suit suited, Kylo’s got two hours to dinner, another hour and a half to the show. Rey’s still… he seeks her mind out, and apparently they’re doing something to her fingernails, so she’ll be occupied for a while.

He’s got time.

And, for a good minute he’s looking at their bag, where he’s got a few of his data pads, mostly financial reports, and some on his current troop retention levels and the like. And, of course there’s the mostly blank one that he’s ‘working on his first anniversary speech’ on. He could take that one out and then poke at it listlessly as words continue to not magically form in his head.

Or… fuck it, he’s on vacation. He grabs Rey’s library and goes looking for something fun. He hasn’t read a novel or play in more than a decade, and he misses it.

In fact… He makes himself a drink, some sort of fruit juice and tea over ice, grabs the pad, and heads out onto the balcony. There’s a lounge chair, a sunny spot, and he’s going to spend an hour or so reading a fucking story, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop him.

As he sets the drink and pad down, he notices that they’ve got speakers up here.

“Why not?”

He fiddles around with the sound cube for a few minutes, and finds something soft and pleasant with an easy melody.

After all, he’s on _vacation._

 

 

* * *

Subtle is… subtle.

Very nicely so.

Rey looks like herself. Just, prettier.

Or more femme.

Softer maybe.

Delicate? That’s not a word she often thinks of in conjunction with herself. Desert rats don’t do delicate. Delicate things die on Jakku.

But she’s not on Jakku. She’s survived Jakku, outlived it even.

Her lashes are longer and darker, there’s a fine line of gray around her eyes, just enough to make them look bigger and bolder, her lips just a hair pinker with a touch of sheen, likewise her cheeks are just a little pinker, and also kissed by a slight sheen.

She was afraid she wouldn’t recognize herself in the mirror, but… She does. It’s _different,_ but… not a costume or a mask.

Kelli’s behind her, grinning. “He’s going to trip over his feet when he sees you.”

Rey’s more than doubtful of that. The Force won’t let him trip. But she wouldn’t mind if he stopped and stared a bit.

“Do you need help getting back into your saree?”

“Yes, please.”

“No problems.”

 

 

* * *

Knocking. At the door. Right. Knocking. Probably Rey… Putting book down… Putting…

Kylo jerks away from the story. He’s really liking it. It’s been so damn long since he just got lost in something fun and fluffy that pulling out of it is proving a bit more difficult than—

More knocking.

Right.

He gets up to grab the door. He’s the one with the key, and Rey’s doing stuff, and then he’s still got to get dressed, and maybe if he reads fast he can fit another two chapters in, or… Maybe he can convince her to go along with having dinner in and then they can read the story together. He’s only an hour and a half in, and wouldn’t mind going back to the beginning…

Vague fantasies of lots of yummy food, the waterbed, and the story are staring to form in his mind as he crosses the room to get the door and finds that it’s not Rey on the other side.

Unni is looking up at him. Her eyes trail slowly from his hair to his waist to his knees, and then, slowly, back up to his eyes. She licks her lips, and smiles up at him, saying, “Your wife is a lucky woman.”

He’s got no idea how to respond to that, other than wishing he’d put at least the trousers back on before he got the door.

“And she’s coming here, soon, so you need to get out.”

He blinks, not understanding why he has to leave the room if his wife is coming to him.

“Come on, grab a shirt and pants, let’s get you out of here before she gets in.”

He blinks again. Whatever this bizarre request is, there’s no threat to it. Nothing nefarious is going to happen if he complies. She waves at the inside of the room, where his clothing has to be, and he just shakes his head and goes along with it.

“One minute.” And in a minute he’s got a shirt and pants, and is being escorted to somewhere not their room.

They’re just… standing in a hallway, two halls over, doing _nothing._ If he realized this strange woman would want him to just stand around, he would have brought the book.

And then, suddenly, for no reason he can see, she just changes her mind. “Okay, go back now.”

“Fine.” _Why am I being evicted from our room for five minutes?_

_You’ll see._

* * *

Kelli’s looking around their room with a critical eye. The kind of eye for the sort of detail Rey’s never had and likely never will have. Whatever it is she’s seeing, Rey can’t even begin to fathom.

But whatever it is, she decides that Rey needs to be on the balcony, early evening sunshine playing across her.

“There. You go right there. Okay, stay put. He’ll be here in a minute.” And then Kelli’s out of their room, and Rey’s waiting, feeling a little silly about this, but…

It’s playtime. And she’s playing.

Sure.

She hears the door open, and a minute later, Kylo’s footsteps. He doesn’t see her immediately, or she him, because there’s no direct line of sight between the doorway and the balcony.

“Rey?”

“Balcony.” She’s staring at the doorway he’s going to appear in in about three seconds and then he does and…

 

 

He stops dead. His foot is still hovering, mid-step, in the air. He puts it down, gently, and just _stares_ at her. He blinks a few times as his eyes go skittering up and down her body, before settling on her face. She watches him do that lip roll thing, though she knows he’s not doing it from discomfort right now. No, right now he’s trying to make something, anything, come out of his mouth, to translate all of the feelings in his head into words.

It’s not happening.

He nods. And she nods back at him, smiling, one eyebrow lifting, just a little challenge in the look, unspoken, though still there, _You wanted to see it, so… Here it is_.

His eyes go a little wide at that, and he licks his lips, and a second later she’s in his arms, and he’s kissing the daylights out of her.

_Worth getting evicted for?_

_YES!_

 

 

* * *

As soon as Kylo puts Rey down. (Which isn’t all that soon.) Any and all ideas of staying in are _gone._

This is the most beautiful woman on the planet, and he wants _everyone_ to see her with him.

He doesn’t want to stop touching her long enough to get dressed, but if she’s taken the time and effort to look like this, he’s damn well getting dressed up for her, too.

“Okay… Uh… Just…” he’s holding her hand, trailing his fingers over hers, _staring_ at her, and she’s looking at him expectantly.

Finally he feels a little nudge of her mind against his. She’s starting to get hungry, and they’re supposed to be leaving for dinner soon, so…

“Right.” And he’s grabbing his things and heading to the bathroom to get changed.

 

 

* * *

Rey sees the pad on the lounge chair, and bookmarks where Kylo was. Then she starts a search. If she’s going to learn how to do this…

If…

He said he’s learn it with her, and that helps. New territory for both of them, right?

There are only seventeen results when she looks up etiquette. That’s not too bad… Probably.

Ugh… Or not. The first book is seven hundred pages long.

She doesn’t groan out loud, or in her head. She doesn’t want to attract his attention to this.

She shuts the pad down. Maybe… when she gets home… She’ll ask Threepio what he’d recommend as a place to start. Maybe she can ask him to teach some basic manners classes… If her little Maji are ever going off planet, and she hopes they will, having some sort of manners would likely matter.

 

 

* * *

There are many things in the galaxy that have surprised Rey over the years. She’s sure there will be many more, but right here, right now, the surprise at hand is the fact that Kylo Ren, strongest Dark Maji in the Galaxy, the man with the black wardrobe, and the black room, with the black ship, and the black socks for the Force’s sake, looks _fucking amazing_ in white.

 

 

Like, her heart’s in danger of stopping, and if it weren’t for the fact she was sitting down when he came out of the bathroom, she’d have done that same dead stop thing he did when he saw her.

A soft little, “uhng” sort of sound goes tripping out of her mouth as she looks at him, hair long and loose, suit… actually, looking at it more, it’s not white, it’s… off white, very light gray, something like that, with a soft, sheen of silver, cool and slippery on his skin, and he’s all but glowing in it, and…

“Wow!”

He’s looking a little bashful, getting stared at, by her, because she likes his clothing, but then he smirks a little, shifts his posture, a bit, not so much straightening up, as… shifting his mind into Emperor Ren, into someone who deserves to be stared at with adoration, and then he grins at her.

She wraps her arms around his, feeling a flush at the two of them, together, going out looking like this. He smiles, and kisses the top of her head, and then quietly says, “Playtime.”

She nods, licking her lips. “Playtime.”

 

 

* * *

People do stare. When they’re walking through the lobby, and then heading toward the restaurant. There are a few moments of _Do they recognize?_ But neither of them feel that. It’s just… Apparently, they make one hell of a fine looking couple, and when they walk by people _look._

 

__

 

* * *

It’s a _good_ restaurant.

Supposedly the best one in the city, definitely the best one in the hotel. And, since they’ve been comped their food… Might as well see what “the best” is.

There are little flashes of ‘fancy person’ training that a very young Ben got, that are poking out here and there. For example, he knows he’s supposed to keep his hand at her low back, and even if her skin weren’t bare, and begging for his touch, he’d do that. And he knows he’s supposed to pull the chair out for her, which he would if there were chairs. And he remembers that the napkin goes on his lap, but again, no chairs, so no lap, so he’s…

Out of his depth.

‘The best’ is a dining style he’s not familiar with.

All of the tables are low to the floor, the soft, strangely giving floor under his feet, and there are pillows all over the place, but there doesn’t appear to be the sort of thing one pulls out for one’s mate.

The hostess takes them to a table, and gestures for them to sit, so they just, do. A bit of looking around shows that most of the people at the tables around them are lounging on their left or right elbow, pillows propping them up, so they can recline comfortably.

So, they arrange pillows, and get comfortable, heads near each other, feet to the far corners of the table.

This is nice. Intimate in a way that eating normally isn’t. Usually chairs mean that they’re close, but not so close that he can just nuzzle her shoulder should he feel like doing it. (And he does, often.)

“What kind of flower is this?” He ends up nuzzling that, too, though he hadn’t intended to.

“Hibiscus of some sort.”

“It smells good.” He kisses her shoulder. “You smell better.”

She smiles at that. “You do, too.”

“Just soap and whatever she put in my hair.”

“Nice soap.” She lays her face against his neck, not a lot of skin, the neck on his jacket is high, but that does let her bury her face in his hair. “Good hair stuff, too.”

“I’ll make sure some of it comes home with us.”

She laughs a little at that. “Rose was in out bathroom last week—“

“Why was Rose in our bathroom?”

“You probably don’t want to know.” And with those words, and the sense of Paige being involved, he decides he doesn’t. He can do without the image of various baby-related fluids and solids tonight. “Anyway, when she came out she asked if I liked the hair stuff, her’s has been off since Paige was born, so she’s thinking about trying something new, and I had to admit that it wasn’t mine.”

He smirks a bit at that.

A moment later, they’ve got a waitress with menus and glasses, pouring water over ice cubes with flowers in them.

 

 

* * *

Once upon a time, Ben, as a small child, learned which fork to use, when. He learned to cut each piece of food, move his fork to the other hand, eat the food, shift the fork back, cut another bite. His mother told him that helped to pace the meal, and gave people time to chew and speak.

His father cut with one hand, the entire piece of whatever it was, at once, and then ate with the other, generally as quickly as he could, and was sincerely displeased to have a five-year-old who could barely cut his own food tell him he was doing it _wrong_.

He told his mother about that the next time he saw her, and she said some people eat differently. The rules change from system to system. So, if he ever didn’t know what to do, to find the highest ranked person in the room, watch them, and do what they do.

He knew his mother was important. “That’s you, right Mama?”

She’d smiled at that. “In some rooms.”

As the waitress is explaining the menu, (Apparently, meals here are a mix of flatbreads, small plates of meat kabobs, veg curries, and salads, all eaten with the flatbreads. They’re supposed to pick five of the options on the menu, and then help themselves.) Kylo’s watching the people around them, seeing how they eat.

It’s similar to what Unni did this morning. They rip small pieces off the bread, and use it to scoop up whatever’s in the bowls around them. They dip each bite in the sauces, and then eat them.

Easy enough.

 

 

* * *

The menu has local prices on it. And he can see this is an expensive night out by local standards, but he’s good enough with math to know that, like his hotel room, his credits are going to go far here.

_I should have recruiting stations all over this system._

Rey smirks at that. _Romantic pillow talk, I take it._

He rolls his eyes a little. _Does it bother you?_

 _No. What’s got you thinking about that?_  (She’d been focusing on the food aspect of the menu.)

_Local exchange rates. My lowest recruits probably make as much in a day as the average person does in a week here._

_Think they’ll be interested in some better-paying options?_

He’s grinning. _A lot of people are._

_So, remember to ask C8 what other systems have this sort of an exchange rate._

He nods at that, thinking it’s good strategy. Might help win some more local support if they hire locals to build their stations. Hardly cost anything to hire somewhere like here. _Why do you think it’s so low?_

She can remember talking to Chewie and Finn about this. _Remember how we had to buy local currency when we got here?_

_Yeah._

_Central bank/government controls the currency rate, and likely what can be imported and exported. Keeps local prices low. If you can get around it, you can pick up stuff cheap and sell high somewhere else._ Which is why Chewie’s wanted in 200 systems. He’s not about to let a good exchange rate go to waste. Local law enforcement generally doesn’t like it when people come in with embargoed goods to trade for things that aren’t supposed to get off world.

Smuggling sounds mysterious and dangerous and whatnot, but often the goods he picks up are fairly pedestrian, things like fruits or fabrics or raw materials in a place where the local governments keep the prices artificially low. If he’s lucky, whatever it is has a high price somewhere else, even better if there are extra taxes on top of it, and he can skirt them all. He and Finn have carried some hot stuff, too, but for the most part, he’s likely got a ship full of something that’s cheap or subsidized on one planet, like milk or bacta or cotton, and has a high tariff on another one.

 _Keeps goods and people on planet._ Kylo thinks, looking around. There may be tourists here, but most everyone around him looks like they’re from this system. Locals likely have to spend a good long time saving up to get enough credits to get off world and then afford anything once they leave.

 _Probably._ She can feel the pleasure bubbling off of him. _Planning on doing something about that?_

He grins at her. _Oh yes!_ He wriggles a little, enjoying the feel of his clothing against his skin. _Wouldn’t mind seeing more of this across the galaxy._

She gives him a little shove. ‘ _Master Ren, why did you open up the Gidi System?’ ‘I really liked the silks.’_

 _I_ do _like them._

She laughs at that.

_Besides, you wouldn’t let me buy the store, so I need to have an easy way to import more of these for you._

That gets an eye roll and a little shove. Her shoulder against his. _Really?_

 

 

He’s looking at her, eyes intense, and then lays his forehead against her temple. He says this with his voice, letting it thrum through both of them. “I love you. I love you all the time and in all ways, but… I _adore_ this. I get to be out with the most beautiful woman on this planet. I get to stroke your skin and smell your perfume, and feel your hair soft against me, and…” his voice drops, whispering against her skin, “and later tonight, I’ll lay back and stare up at you, utter bliss in my eyes as you ride me, skin gleaming, silk gently brushing your breasts and belly. I’ll worship between your legs, and hold you tight as you slip against me. I’ll feel you clench and twitch, and know I’m the one doing it for you.”

He can feel arousal flushing through her at his words, feel his own rise at the ideas and images he’s conjuring. He’s kind of wishing that there were the sorts of tables that his lower half would be seated under here, but… nothing to do be done for it. He shifts his jacket a bit, offering himself some coverage. He strokes her shoulder, and arm, looking at her, from the royal purple flower to those delicious little toenails sparking copper and purple. He’s never given her toes a second thought to before, but he intends to spend some time kissing them later tonight.

“It just _gets_ to me. _This._ ” His eyes trace over her. “That you’ll do this, for me. I know…” his eyes trail up and down her body in her dress, and her pretty nails, and the jewelry at her wrists, and he just _loves_ this, “this isn’t something you’d do for you. So, I want to make you feel as good as possible doing it, because, yes, I’m trying to encourage you to do this more often, but… If tonight’s it, then tonight’s it, and I’m going to enjoy the hell out of every second of it.”  He opens his mind, emotions to her, lets her feel how this feels to him.

And part of it, part he’s likely not exactly internalized, not until now, falls into place. Beauty, desire, pleasure… None of those were things he was ever allowed to enjoy. Luke pulled them away because they involved wanting. Snoke burned them because they lessened his pain, and anything that brought him comfort made him less useful to Snoke.

He’s reveling in it. Has been for a while now. In her body, and scent, and the way they can make each other feel, and more basic things like food that tastes good, or sleeping when he’s tired, or not sitting in his throne because it’s uncomfortable, or… Just, physically enjoying things.

And this is another level of it. This is a treat for his eyes, for his desire, for his love and affection, and a nod at a future he hopes they find, and all of it wraps up into this glorious package that just makes him feel so happy and content. He’s showering her with it, letting his feelings cradle her, and he sees her flush, mostly with borrowed pleasure. He smiles, glad she’s understanding it.

If beauty, sensual pleasure, and desire were things actively denied him, they just _weren’t_ things in her world.

She’s uncomfortable because this is new, because it involves moving into a world where she doesn’t know the rules. She feeds that to him, the uncertainty, the fear of messing it up, the gut-clenching sensation of not just being wrong, but everyone seeing her be wrong, and he pets her with his adoration.

He doesn’t care if she’s ‘wrong.’ To him, she _can’t_ be wrong, not doing something like this.

And it helps, some.

 

 

* * *

Food helps some, too. There’s only so much existential angsting you can do when there’s a collection of very tasty looking things in front of you, all smelling fabulous, and waiting for you to try them all out.

Granted, food is easy. Even if your manners are awful, you still get a yummy mouthful of it.

And, really, neither of them know the particulars of this culture’s eating habits.

There’s got to be more of it than break off bits of bread and scoop up food, but they can’t tell just by looking.

And looking, Kylo remembers his mother’s tip. _When I was little, my mother told me to match your manners to whomever the highest ranked person in the room is._

Rey raises an eyebrow.

Kylo smirks at her. He kisses her shoulder, and then takes the bite of food she’s offering, gently kissing her finger, then he looks around the room. If anyone else controls a galaxy spanning military organization on the verge of spreading a massive society-changing political paradigm shift across the stars, or the head of a tiny, but growing religion that’s intending to radically redesign how people think about the universe, the divine, and their place in it, they’re doing as good a job of hiding as Kylo is.  _I have a feeling, in most rooms, that’s us._

She rolls her eyes.

_And I know for a fact, that on the Supremacy, it’s us._

_And if you have your way, in the next few years, in_ any _room it’ll be us?_

Kylo smiles at that. _Maybe._ He looks at them, next to each other, here. _And even if I don’t have the numbers, my people are with me by choice. That’s got to be worth something, right?_

_It is._

* * *

Kylo wasn’t expecting ‘acrobatics’ to be… this. Leia took him to a circus once, and there had been tumblers there, and he’d watched them bounce and flip around. So, he was expecting something like that.

If you’d shown him this, and asked what it was, he’d have told you this was a ballet. Just, somehow, with a lot more flipping around in the air. This has a set, costumes, a fully functional storyline (Man A wants to be with Woman B, but she’s in love with Man C, who is actually a woman and in love with Man A, and there’s a wizard casting some sort of spell on everyone, and… It’s complicated.), and music, and people doing things he honestly didn’t think were possible without the Force, but they’re doing it.

Rey didn’t have any expectations on what acrobatics would be, other than less sad than a drama and less funny than a comedy.

They’re about half-way through when Rey thinks to him, _You know, this would be done by now if all three of them just got together with each other._

He smirks at that. _Yeah, but that’s a short show._

She looks over at him, and gently strokes her hand down his arm, slipping her fingers across his hand. _Maybe, I wouldn’t mind a short show._

He gets the unspoken context on that _fast._

They never do find out if A gets B, or if B gets C, or if C got A, or if the Wizard somehow turned them into a happy trio or…

Neither do they care.

 

 

* * *

There’s a glorious, vaguely naughty anticipation that goes with leaving the show early. Their room is only a few moments away. Just get out of the theater, find the elevators, punch in 15, and walk down a hallway.

Three minutes, five tops.

Walking through the theater and hallway to the elevators… There are hundreds of other people, all milling around, doing whatever it is they’re doing. None of them know, or care, why they’re leaving, where they’re going, what they’re going to do when they get there.

But they know what’s coming when they get to their room.

Kylo’s hand is on the small of Rey’s back, and his little finger is just, barely, brushing below the hem of her saree, pad of his finger against her smooth skin.

They’re not the only ones in the elevator. Four other people file in with them, punching different floors. Kylo and Rey slide to the back, they’ve got the highest floor.

She leans back against him, and his hands rest on her hips. This time it’s his thumb that finds her skin, dipping below the hem of her skirt, stroking gently, subtly, against the skin of her hip.

She reaches up, cupping his neck in her hand, humming, a little: her voice low, subvocal. He can feel it, she can, too. The people in front of them are all looking at the doors of the elevator, not the couple behind them.

Her fingers stroke through his hair, feeling it soft and warm, heavy.

His voice is subvocal, too. Unheard but felt. A soft rumble of pleasure at her touch. He turns his head, kissing her forehead, breathing in her scent, and basking in her body against his.

The doors open, they close, again and again, eventually, they’re the only ones in the elevator, and eventually, they’re on the fifteenth floor.

Alone.

Together.

 

 

* * *

The door shuts behind them. The click is quiet, but they both feel it. It’s not like this is the first time. Not like they haven’t done this before, probably dozens of times in the last month alone, but…

But it’s different, too.

Kylo’s not entirely certain where to start. He’s looking at her, enjoying looking, and part of him is enjoying the anticipation, sort of like the first few birthdays, before he was a Jedi, back when his parents could give him presents without tripping up on the idea of wanting being a problem.

Granted, back then he wasn’t exactly _good_ about enjoying that moment of _not_ knowing what was in the package.

He doesn’t want to rush. He wants to savor this, and take it slow, and feel every heartbeat of it, and… His hand reaches out, and he gently pulls the flower from her hair. Then he lightly strokes it across her cheek and down her neck.

Rey smiles at him, shivering a little.

“Feel good?”

“Yes.” She unhooks the first of the clasps on his jacket. “It’s a good color on you.”

He smirks a little, and then lifts her hand to his lips, kissing each knuckle, rubbing his thumb over them. “It’ll look better on the floor.”

She rolls her eyes. “Maybe. On the floor it’s just a pile of wrinkles. On you it’s…” She leans closer, and raises to her tiptoes, and kisses to him, “Magic.”

He grins all over at that, kissing her back. His fingers slip down her saree, silk warm with the heat of her body. “This is magic. No piece of fabric has any right looking this good.” He finds the first of the pins, and undoes it.

She steps back a little, holding the kiss, but letting her fingers get to the next clasp on his jacket. “How many of these are there?”

“I didn’t count.”

She gets the third, and then lays a kiss on his throat. She’s got about four centimeters of the jacket undone, so… It’s going to take a while.

And neither of them mind.

He’s on the third pin, and starting to get an idea. The silk is wrapped around her hips twice, gathered and pleated and folded over on itself along most of her body. There’s a skirt and breast band under it. But, lifting some of it in his hand, he can see that one width of it is basically transparent.

This, by itself, warm and smooth and soft. Draped loosely around her, he’ll be able to see her delta and nipples, feel the texture and her skin…

Hints of her body and his. Soft, easy, teasing…

He undoes another pin, three more to go. His lips find her shoulder, and he can feel her fingers moving from one clasp to the next, she’s about midway down the jacket now, getting him closer to undressed.

Two pins. The silk is starting to sag against the floor, and he can’t wait to get the skirt and breast band off. He bends down a bit, kissing her chest, nuzzling his lips and nose against the swell of her breasts through the silk.

One pin. He gives the silk a little tug and it goes cascading down her body. He wraps it around his hand, again and again. It’s three meters long, but so fine that the entire length of it barely makes a bulge in his hand.

She’s smiling up at him, in her breast band and skirt, and he wonders if she’s wearing anything under the skirt. He can’t see the line of her shorts, but she doesn’t just have shorts, so… pretty images…

One of her fingers lights upon his chin, lifting it, him up, for another long, slow, lip to lip kiss.

The breast band has a set of clasps in the back, so he gets to work on them as she kisses him, her lips rubbing over his, her tongue gently stroking him.

He feels his jacket open, and is about to shrug it off, but she stops him, and he feels her desire to see him somewhat undressed. _Undone._

He grins into her kiss, liking the idea of that quite a bit.

When the breast band hits the floor, his hands move down, to the drawstring on the skirt. A quick tug slips the knot, and then it’s also on the floor, pooling at her feet.

He breaks the kiss, stepping back, wanting to see her.

Rey lets him look his fill, standing before him, naked save for the fine copper chains around her waist and arms, the gleaming black ring he placed on her finger. She slips the chains off, maybe later they’ll be part of a game, but right now she wants skin and silk.

She’s looking at him. Still “dressed” technically. He hasn’t taken anything off, though his jacket is open, leaving his chest and belly naked, and he’s tenting his trousers, his body seeking hers.

He makes sure to catch her eye, and then slowly unwinds the silk from his hand, and just as slowly wraps it around her, leaving her swathed in a cloud soft silk, so thin he can see her shadows and curves through it.

His breath is coming fast, looking at her, and she trails her fingers down his chest, licking her lips.

She tugs his trousers down, over his shaft, and kneels before him. He knows what’s coming next and strokes her face and hair.

It’s his favorite sight ever. Well, at this moment in time. Anything that involves Rey taking him into her body is his favorite sight while she’s doing it, and…

She’s got her hand around him, and is pulling him down a little, and...

Gods, he can see her body through the shift of the silk, and his shaft in her hand… And her mouth, her sweet, sweet mouth opening to take him in, and she’s looking up at him, pleasure all over her face and in her touch because doing this for him gets to her, too, and… He watches her, watches her suck him down, watches her hand close around him and her lips close around him, and she sinks her head down and then he just can’t keep watching because it feels so good.

 

 

His head falls back and his eyes drop closed and there’s just the feel of her, wet and soft and sucking and perfect, so perfect, her touch and love and joy and, he’s rocking his hips, chasing more friction, more feelings, more of her body slick and wet on his and…

His hands close in her hair, and he gently pulls her back, away from him.

“Kylo?” she knew he’d been enjoying that, immensely.

“Don’t want this to end, not yet.” He wasn’t close, not on a hair trigger, but he could feel how easy it would have been to have just given into it. To spurt here, feeling, watching.

“How do you want this to end?” she asks with a smile, standing up, as he grazes his fingers over her shoulders and breast, rubbing them against the silk, making it rub against her skin. He takes a moment to kick off his shoes, sure he’s not going to need them again anytime soon.

“Not until I’ve had you quivering on my tongue. Not until my face is soaked with you. Not until your legs have wrapped around my head, and your delta’s slick with my spit, and every inch of your body is lit up with pleasure and my love. Then… I want you to ride me. I want to lay back and feel you bounce on my shaft.”

She kisses him hard, lips wet, tongue sliding between them. _That can be arranged._

_Good._

She squeaks when he scoops her up, the same way he did when he took her to his ship the first time, cradling her body against his chest, and this time, she’s enjoying it significantly more.

 

 

Granted, this time, she knows what’s under the mask. She strokes his face, eyes gazing at his. They aren’t kissing, not right now, because right now looking matters, and it’s hard to look when you’re lip to lip.

 _I love you._ Her? Him? Both?

Yes.

The bed is only a few more steps away, and he sinks onto it, placing her next to him, on her back, wrapped in royal purple silk. His fingers trail over her breasts, ghosting silk along her nipples, lips following, pulling lightly.

He can feel her pushing the jacket off of his shoulders, and he pulls back long enough to yank it and his trousers off. He’s as naked as he gets, and she’s grinning up at him, looking him from top to bottom, eyes lingering on the width of his shoulders, narrow waist, muscular hips, and maybe it’s not the biggest shaft to ever rise, but it’s his, and it’s fucking delicious.

He smiles down at her, returning to the bed, kneeling over her body, palming her shoulders and breasts and belly, stroking the silk over her skin. He can’t get enough of how this feels, how it looks.

“So good,” his voice is low, rumbling through both of them.

He rolls her over, onto her belly, and trails his fingers up the backs of her thighs. The silk is translucent, so he can see, but not _everything._ Enough.

He lays kisses on her low back, and her butt, biting gently on the fleshy bit, hands cupping around her hips. “I love this curve.”

She wiggles, pleased, at that and him.

Then he pulls back a little further, to just _look._ When she’d hit him with this image last night… Well, it’s not an angle she ever looks at herself, so… He liked the mental picture, but it wasn’t exactly _right_. He likes the real thing, better.

His thumbs graze along the inside of her thighs, just, barely, brushing the lips of her maomao, before he gives each cheek a good, firm squeeze. Rey moans, a soft, guttural sound. He loves that sound, wants to make it, and more like it, go tumbling out of her mouth. He ripples his fingers, rubbing his thumbs in wide circles, digging into firm muscle and soft skin, and her hips rise, seeking more.

He smiles at that, a very definite idea of _more_ in his head.

He leans forward, dipping his face toward her, and _more_ is his tongue, wet and soft, gliding along the same path his thumb traveled, from just, almost, brushing along where he knows she wants it, across the line of her buttock, to lave over the full, lush curve of her hip.

More is wet silk dragging along her skin, lighting up her nerves.

More is slowly pulling that silk up, revealing centimeter after centimeter of her skin, and then allowing his hands to land on her, nothing but skin on skin, and his tongue to once again follow.

More is the scent of her, the taste, her wet against his, and a glorious, shuddering, “Kylo!” as he pulls her up to her hands and knees, licking from her pearl to her spine, tongue dancing over her skin, gliding along her, as her hips rock, looking for more of her own.

He slides under her, so she’s lying against him, her face almost at his shaft, and her whole delta pressed against his face.

Her mouth finds his shaft again, and again, he groans, loud at it. Nothing, at all, feels like her hand tight around the base of him as her lips wrap around his tip, and she licks him.

He tightens his grasp upon her hips and butt, thumbs spreading her wide, as he licks her deep and steady. He knows this, his tongue in her, sliding in and out, is more for him than her, it doesn’t quite light her up the way it does him, but… for a moment…

He pulls her up a little further, and she raises up a bit more, too.

 _There_ he thinks to her, because right now he’s eye to eye with her maomao, and her pearl is right at his mouth, and she’s slick against his nose, and…

 

 

It’s like swimming in sex. Being buried in it. She’s wet and slick and delicious and messy and all over his face, and he’s rocking his hips, planting his feet under him, giving himself a bit more leverage, curling in a bit on himself. His torso’s long enough that if she’s here, and he doesn’t do that, all she can get is the top few centimeters of his shaft into her mouth, and right now, he wants _more_ too.

One thrust, two, _more…_ She’s got him deep in her mouth, and he’s got his tongue gliding over her pearl in little circles, and her hand is on him, stroking up and down with her mouth, and right… he’s got hands, too, and he pushes her up just enough, so he can lick his fingers, get them good and wet, and then thrusts into her as she pulls him deep into her mouth, and both of them shudder all over at that.

They’re building slow. Nothing gentle or light about the touches, but _slow._

_Deep._

She’s got his shaft as far into her mouth as it can go, and squeezing the bottom in her slick fingers. Easing all the way up and all the way down, letting him feel her tongue against him, and the place where the roof of her mouth goes from hard to soft.

He’s stroking his fingers in and out as far as they go, rocking them in and out, again, slow. Nothing rushed, nothing fast, nothing _missed._ He tries wiggling them, curling them forward and back as he moves, and as he does that, when he’s pulling out, she jolts against his face.

He’d been more focusing on his fingers and shaft, how he’s feeling what she’s doing to him, and what he’s doing to her, than on how she’s feeling what’s happening, so it catches him by surprise.

It doesn’t the second time he does it, because he’s focused on her now, on feeling him and his actions through her, and there’s a spot, an angle, something, where he just rocks his fingers into it, and her body lights up… Like he’s licking her pearl from the one side, and pressing it from the other, and once he gets that idea in his head, once he gets the feel of it…

He matches his tongue to his fingers, pressing forward with both at the same time, and Rey shudders on top of him, another of those glorious, aroused sounds pouring out of her, vibrating over his shaft, thrilling his heart and body.

He’s not sure if dedicating his life to making that sound fall out of her mouth as often as possible is aiming low or aiming high, but he fucking loves the idea of it.

He does it again, and again, and once more, and she’s not really sucking him any longer, which he doesn’t mind at all, because he can feel how lost she is in her good time, and he’d prefer his shaft not be in her mouth when she’s not focused on what her teeth are doing.

He focuses in further, can feel her writhing on top of him, feel that this is good, that it’s almost too much, but at the same time not quite enough and…

 _Suck_ breaks out of her head, so he does, sucking on her pearl as he presses from the inside, and that’s the motion/feeling that spirals her over the edge. That’s what starts the slow spurt, her body tingling from head to toes, muscles lighting up and dancing with pleasure.

He can feel the wave cresting over her, the twitch of her body releasing, he keeps himself back from it, aware of it, but not feeling it, because this isn’t how he wants to go over the edge, not right now, not yet.

He strokes her back and butt and hips, feeling her relaxing against his torso. He lays light kisses over her maomao, gently licking her wet.

When he can feel her brain come back to her, he thinks, It’s _silly, but the only word I know for this is spurt, but… You don’t spurt._

She laughs, a little, face tucked against his hip. _Gush._

 _Some._ His face is definitely wet, but… he wouldn’t call that a gush. He offers her another gentle lick. _Ooze or leak may be accurate. But not exactly on target for the timing of the issue. When I spurt, you know it. It’s not like it goes on for the whole time we commune. You start to leak well before you hit your spurt._

_My spurt that doesn’t spurt._

_Yeah._

She can feel the question he’s not asking. _No special word for this._

He feels her grasp his shaft. _Speaking of spurts that didn’t. You’re not done._

 _Nope._ He grins against her thigh. _Didn’t want to be, not yet._

_Still want me riding you?_

_Wouldn’t mind, but mostly I just wanted you focused enough on me to not get bitten, and wanted me focused enough on me to just enjoy it._

_In that case…_ Rey takes him back in her hand, and mouth.

Kylo sighs, very happy. She moves down him a bit, and to some degree, he’d like her delta right in his face. Even if he’s not doing much, he loves having it near. Loves to be able to lazily lick and kiss, just because it makes him feel good to do so. On the other side, it’s a lot less work for him if he can just lie back and receive, which he can’t really do if she’s right in his face, so…

He closes his eyes and relaxes back into the bed, a bit of a grin on his face.

She gets up, flips around, so she’s facing his head, and a moment later, she taps his hip. He raises up and she shoves some pillows under him. That grin on his face gets wider. If she’s doing that, she’s getting him up high enough so she can do this easy. She’s going to take the time to suck his brains out through his shaft, and he adores that.

 _Yes, please_ is more or less radiating off of him.

He hasn’t opened his eyes, but he can feel her doing something… Calling… the massage oil to hand. She nudges his inner thigh, and he spreads his legs, feeling her settle between them. That _yes please_ glows brighter. Anything she wants to do to him that involves getting sucked and her oiled skin gliding over his is just fine by him.

He can hear the bottle opening, and then feels slick hands stroking up his thighs and over his stones and shaft, and it’s his turn to moan, loud and content. This is just fabulous. He’s purring at her, melting against her touch, trying to get her mouth into play, but her hands are good too, and he feels the drip, the first drop of pre-spurt or whatever it’s called slowly meandering down his shaft, and…

He groans again as her tongue catches it, licking from his tip to his stones.

_That thing you did, where it felt like you were sucking from both sides… How did you do that?_

He’s not sure why she’d want to know that now, but… He bends his elbow, lifting his hand, and shows her the gesture he used.

“Can I try that on you?”

Warm and content and happy and turned on and so, so, so _yes please_ all sort of stop, at once, as he attempts to figure out _how_ that could even be possible. It’s not that he’s averse to the idea, what he could feel of it from Rey was awesome. If he could feel that way, he’d love to. He’s just got no idea of _how._

He sits up a little, leaning on his elbows. “Uh… I don’t think I’m built for that.”

 

 

She’s looking him in the eye, and then one of her hands leaves his shaft, trails over his stones, down, below them, and down a bit further, before stopping _there._

That’s an idea that has not, literally, on any level, _ever_ occurred to him.

“Uh…”

She doesn’t do anything, doesn’t move, or press, or anything, just letting him think about it.

“Does that… _work?_ ” Because he can’t think of how _that_ might feel good.

“I…” she blushes a little. “Don’t know, but… I mean… Uh… Okay… So… The kids weren’t with us when we had this conversation, but… You know Poe likes boys, so… We… um… Finally asked him what they _do_ with each other, because Rose and I weren’t exactly sure, and… he says it’s good.”

First off, he didn’t know that Poe liked boys. Second of all, he’s also never spent any real time attempting to imagine what two men might do with each other. He knows men have sex with each other, but his brain never attempted to fill in any details beyond that. If asked, he’d have probably assumed it involved a lot of oral sex, frottage, and hand jobs. Third of all, that’s likely more than he ever needed to know about Poe. And… okay… seeing that apparently it is an option, because while he didn’t know what sort of person Poe was having sex with, he had gotten enough of the stories to know that Poe seems to do it a lot, and would likely know if it’s good or not, so… Or… wait… two sides to that… And he can very easily imagine how one half of that equation might feel really good.

“Does Poe do it or get it done to him?” After all, it’s possible the girls, not generally being on the same side of the equation he’s on, misunderstood what Poe liked about it.

“Rose asked. He said both.” Or they got the idea just fine and decided to make sure they knew what he was talking about.

“Okay.”

“Okay, you’re acknowledging the point, or okay,” she gently strokes that finger against him. It’s slick and gentle and doesn’t feel bad, “give it a try?”

He lays back. “Okay, both, but go slow, and stay tuned into me.”

“I can do that.”

He’s not nearly as laying back into a puddle of content goo, but… This is okay. He’s… somewhere between nervous and excited, not sure what to expect, but… She’s got her hand around his shaft, stroking up and down, and that’s a winner no matter what, then her lips find his tip, and…

Okay, very happy puddle of goo time.

Puddle of very happy, very turned on, extremely pleased with her and the universe in general, goo.

He’s not sure what she’s going to do, but as of this point, it doesn’t seem to involve much moving of her other hand. It’s just there. Soft, dull pressure. He could almost forget those fingers are there.

And, after another moment, where her hand and mouth glide over him together, he does.

It’s when his hips start to rock, lifting his body up, more into her hand and mouth and other hand, that he understands what she’s doing. She’s letting him set the pace.

So he does, tentatively, lifting his hips to her. It’s an… interesting, he guesses would be the word, sensation. And, unlike the first time he felt a mouth close around his shaft, which required exactly no time on his part to decide if it was good, he’s not sure if he likes this.

It’s not bad.

He arches his hips a little higher and she slides in a little deeper and… There’s some stretch, which he doesn’t exactly love, and a little burn, which is kind of uncomfortable, but, like when they were working on his shoulder, his shaft seems to like that, a lot.

It’s almost like the burn… It doesn’t hurt less because he’s feeling something good, but it sharpens the good.

The heavy, full, rush of his shaft moving through her hand and lips is just that much more intense, that much sharper.

He arches more, rocks deeper onto her fingers and feels her hand against his butt cheeks. The slide is… as he’s getting more used to it, kind of nice. Sort of like when he sucks on her tongue or fingers.

She’s rocking her finger, like what he did to her, and that just feels weird. Like maybe it’s near something that could be really good, but isn’t there.

He remembers that when he did it to her, he was pulling out as he did it, so he rocks his hips back as she does it and, “FUCK” jolts out of his mouth as his hips jerk, hard, at the sensation. For a heartbeat, he thought he’d just jumped over the edge, feeling the first pulse of his spurt, but there’s one only pulse, so… nope.

From both sides, indeed.

Okay, that’s a trick worth trying again.

For him, at least.

She’s pulled back, gagging, because he just poked her in the tonsils, hard.

“Shit, sorry.”

After a few more seconds, she’s got control over herself, and says, “I take it that works for you.”

“Uh… yeah… It does… It…” He’s never attempted to explain how his spurt feels to him, but if anyone would understand… “There’s the tingle, and the muscle spasms, and the actual spurt part of the spurt, it’s a sort of pulse sensation, and… that feels a lot like the spurt part of the spurt.”

“So, it’s good?”

“Yeah, it’s good, just… Wasn’t expecting it and… Sorry.”

She grins at him. “Well, we both know to expect it now, so…”

He grins back, laying down again, clasping his hands behind his head. “So, fuck me!” His eyes meet hers, dark and wanting, above a wide grin. “Please!”

“Oh… I will.” She’s grinning back at him, wrapping her hand around his shaft, and settling in, nice and comfortable between his legs.

This time he holds still. It’s easier not to thrash around if he’s not rocking his hips at all. She’s still going slow, getting a feel for how to do this best, and he’s good with that. Better with when she presses him on the one side and sucks on the other, and his whole body wants to levitate off the bed it feels so good, but if he did that it’d have to stop, so his thighs clench and his fingers and toes curl, and he lifts his head so he can watch her do it, again and again and again. His shaft slipping wet and slick between her fingers and lips.

Mouth and hand slow on his shaft, finger slow on his… whatever that is. He feels so good, and his hips are so tight, so on the edge of the wave that he doesn’t think he could move if he had to.

This spurt is coming for him slow. It’s creeping through his veins, and clawing at his fingers and toes, each muscle and nerve alight with tension quivering, waiting to release.

Part of him is pleading with her to speed up, incoherent sounds spilling from his mouth as he begs her to put him over the edge. Part of him, deeper, inside, is begging for her not to, to keep him here, just about to crest over, but not actually dropping, yet.

Apparently she can read both voices.

She’s staring him in the eyes, grinning, and licking the head of his shaft, and he can see he’s leaking, see her perfect little pink tongue gliding over him, see the pleasure in her eyes and glowing from her skin.

_Close your eyes._

He does, slowly, having a hard time making his body take orders from his brain, but eventually, they close, and for a second he’s hovering, waiting, not sure what’s going to happen next, and then he feels her straddle him, feels her maomao sliding hot and wet and slick down him, clasping him tight, and up, and down again.

“Open them.”

They leap open, and for a heartbeat, two, he’s watching her riding him, adoration pouring off of him as she’s grinding up and back on his shaft, her body jiggling and bouncing, every curve and flat shrouded in translucent silk, and he’s exploding, dropping into the crest of the wave, feeling it course through him, shaking his whole body and whiting out his vision.

His heart is thundering, breath gasping, body twitching from the release, when he comes back to himself.

She’s resting on his chest, gently stroking his face, and he can feel her body twitching on his, apparently he took her over the edge, too.

He doesn’t open his eyes. They closed at some point, but he has no idea when. He does kiss her and nuzzle the top of her head a little.

Eventually she says, “The electrician at this place is going to be glad to see us go.”

He, barely, cracks one eyelid, and yes, he’s blown the power again.

_I’d laugh, but I’m too damn relaxed._

“Good.” She kisses his chest.

 

 

* * *

In the morning, after breakfast, they change out of the ‘local wear’ and back into their normal clothing.

She can feel he’s a little disappointed to see the sarees get folded up and put into the bag, but… There’s nowhere on Lirium to wear them. And even if there was, they’re for a warm climate, and they don’t have one. Not now.

They spend the hours between Gidi Secundus and Lirium working. He’s got his datapad in front of him, writing his first year speech. Getting enough down time to really relax seems to have gotten some of his ideas flowing.

She’s reading up on different insulation systems, and what sort of heaters do best with small dwelling units.

It’s… work.

Companionable, quiet, work.

She can feel it, as he’s writing, that there’s an image in his mind of giving it, with her standing there, next to him, approving of this, of him, of the Order. He offered her a galaxy, and still wants to give it to her.

She strokes his hair as he writes. “Can I read it?”

“Not yet. When I’ve got a real draft done, and it’s not just words spattered on a page.”

“Okay.”

A moment later, he pauses in his flow of words. “Learning something good?”

“Maybe. There are physical insulations, and then there are field ones. Fields take more power, but do a better job keeping the temperature stable. So, if the power goes, the insulation goes with it. Physical ones are good forever, but don’t keep block as much heat loss or gain.”

He nods. “Ships usually have the field ones, right?”

“Yeah. The difference between the inside of the ship and the outside is too great for physical insulation to handle.”

“So…”

“Gotta see if the shipstones work as well as they claim to. If we can get a really steady power supply…”

He nods.

She can feel he’s still seeing the two of them, at his speech, but he doesn’t say it, doesn’t ask. He leaves it there, letting her know it’s an option, if she wants it.

She leans to him, and kisses him. “I love you.”

He smiles back. “I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is completely gratuitous, so feel free to skip it, but... When I first wrote this chapter, it was before tumblr and the 'walks like he's got a big dick' thing which decided to name Kylo Ren their spokesman. But it popped up before this chapter went live, and you know, once that happened, I kind of, developed a bit of a joke, that sort of had to go into the story.
> 
> That said, through... um... serious and thorough study of Adam Driver in as little clothing as he'll let people take pictures of him, I'm coming to the conclusion, that like the rest of him, he's big but not enormous. 
> 
> And, because I'm that person, I've... uh... checked, and since I can't quite nail down how tall he is, (reports range from 6'2" to 6'5") and I'm guessing 6'4" based on how he looks in photographs next to other people. Anyway, 6'4" puts him at the top end of one standard deviation above the norm for American male height. Now, again, because I'm that person, I did a little looking, and average male penis size is at 13.25 cm. A standard deviation for that is 1.8 cm, meaning the dick size that would correspond to Adam's height is 15.05 cm (a hair over six inches for those of us who are Americans.) I uh, bumped that a little, for kicks and giggles in my artwork and story, but... Anyway, now you know vastly more about the statistics of average American males and Adam Driver's probable penis length. 
> 
> You're welcome. ;)


	51. Deus Ex Testudinata

12/1/1

 

It’s a scream out of her worst nightmare’s worst nightmare. A curdling, plaintive wail of horror and pain.

Rey’s heart is beating a million times a second and her body is electric with fear. Something is out there. Something _bad._

They’re behind the chapel, her, Rose, most of the younger children, working on clearing a place for another power generator. It turns out that the shipstones work exactly as well as they’re supposed to, so they’re going to hook the chapel up to its own one, so it can stay warm without draining power from the rest of the settlement. A huge, high dome looks excellent, until you’ve got to keep it warm. Then it’s a huge amount of empty warm space well above the heads of anyone in the dome.

“Get them inside. I’ll…” She’s got her lightstaff extended and ready and runs in the direction of the noise. Rose is already gathering them up, herding them toward the chapel, nothing short of a blaster cannon is getting through that dome, and whatever is screaming, it likely doesn’t have a blaster canon.

That said, Rose has got her blaster out, and is ready to fight if need be.

Rey’s running, and the sound is swelling, rising up and down in an unending cacophony of pain.

“Rey!” Rafe yells, running next to her out of the microfarm.  

“Get in the greenhouse!” she yells back. The last thing she needs is to have to protect a well-meaning farmer who can only hit a target with his blaster half the time from whatever this thing is.

She can feel he wants to fight, but she hits him hard with a blast of Force, making him want to take cover.

She’s in town, running between the huts when she sees… it.

It’s huge, at least as big as two of the huts, covered in some sort of plates. It’s got a long neck and a round bulbous head, with a sharp, pointed beak, and longer, spiky claws on each of it’s four wide feet. They found shells, one as big as their huts, and a few eggs, and they knew there had to be big turtles, but somehow she envisioned some sort of large, gentle, rounded creature. A large, gentle _herbivore._ Or maybe something that eats fish and the lizards that live underground. Not this huge, beaky, spiky monstrosity that’s eating one of the Faviers alive.

It’s screaming, kicking with the one leg it’s got left, as the turtle lowers its mouth for another bite.

She runs at it, whacking it, hard, with the laser end of her staff, and it doesn’t even blink. It’s not even aware she’s there. Its plates are too hard for her laser to penetrate, at least, not with a quick shot. If the black saber weren’t inside her fucking cottage, she’s pull it to hand, but… She doesn’t have the time or focus to open the door with the Force.

She circles the turtle fast, looping around, giving the Favier a quick death stroke, putting it out of its misery, and then swinging up, arcing through the air, slicing at the eye of the thing, making it rear back and yelp, startled.

Rey yelps, too. At her side, in his full command blacks, saber extended, glowing flickering red, is Kylo. He’s already attacking the thing, hitting it hard and fast and going full at it, and, like her, rapidly figuring out that he can’t hit it through the plates, but that doesn’t stop him from swinging himself up onto it’s back and stabbing down, using his strength and weight to force his blade, slowly, through the plates.

The thing is getting unconfused fast, and it snaps at Rey, who’s not about to be bitten in half by some sort of meat-eating giant turtle. She ducks, and its beak scrapes across her shoulder, ripping through her coat and jacket, but not her skin. That gives her a shot at the inside of its mouth. It rears again when she stabs it through the roof of its mouth, taking off the front of its face.

Its jump almost knocks Kylo off, but he’s got more than enough balance to resettle himself on top of it, twisting his blade, deepening the hole, seeking the soft, vital organs he knows have to be under the plates.

The thing is screaming now, voice loud enough to deafen, spit spraying from what’s left of its mouth, and Rey rolls to the side, coming up at its shoulder, aiming a blow to the neck, hoping that will end this, but her blade is only long enough to slice through a third of its neck.

It lashes out with its front leg, trying to rake her side with its claws, weaker now. She ducks, shifting to the side, hoping to get a strike in on the underside of its neck when it suddenly goes limp and collapses. She sees Kylo, having gotten his blade through the plates on its back, stirring it around like a spoon in a cup of coffee, destroying whatever vital organs were nearest to that thing’s shell.

As soon as it’s clear that it’s dead, he’s on the ground, trying to get close to her, to check the scrapes, fear pouring off of him at the cuts in her coat, but she’s holding her staff out at him, looking back to where the children and Rose are, far enough away they don’t have a good view, but close enough to see the fucking man in black and his glowing red lightsaber, and the Kennas, Critt, and Jacen, all staring straight at them, only fifty meters away in the microfarm, shock clear on their faces.

Rey whips them back to the Supremacy.

 

 

* * *

“You shit stain on the back of a wrinkled cajoolie!”

He’s panting from the adrenaline spike, fear only slowly starting to ebb away as he’s cataloging Rey. No real blood. The rips in her coat have… nothing. It didn’t get through the shirt underneath. Split lip, scratches on her neck and eyebrow, but… She’s fine. He’s breathing hard and fast, but it’s starting to slow down. The fact that they’re on his ship in his chamber is only starting to sink in and…

He’d hug her, except she’s still got her staff extended, though the blade is off, and from the look of it, she’s about to hit him with it.

He blinks, making himself calm down. She’s fine. Angry, but _fine._ All body parts are accounted for, and she might have some nasty bruises soon, but she was giving way more than she got.

He feels like his mind is trapped in glue, and… “Is that the word?”

She blinks hard. “What?”

“Cajoolie… is that the fighting word?” He’s feeling numb with relief, and almost on the verge of laughing because it’s the silliest damn word in the history of humans stringing syllables together.

Rey does not appear to be experiencing either of those emotions though. Her voice is red hot as she bites out, “You’re asking me _that_?”

“What else should I say?” He tries to get a little closer to look at the scratches on her face.

She yells and hit the floor with her staff, hard. “What else? What else!”

Kylo takes a step back. Not time to get closer, yet. There’s a quiet, tentative knock on his door, along with the voice of one of his generals. “Master Ren?”

He holds up a finger to her, darts to the door, opens it, and bites out. “I am fine. You are dismissed. If anyone touches this door again before I reconvene you, I will personally break the fingers used to do it.” Then he slams the door, shoots the bolt home, and returns to her. “I don’t know what you want! I don’t know why you’re mad!”

“You?!? Don’t know…” She hits his table and the few cups on it rattle and then stalks right up to him. “You showed up in the middle of the day, in the middle of my town, in your full command blacks, with your mark of rank on the sleeve, lightsaber extended and attacked that… thing… THEY SAW YOU!” she shoves him, hard, and he allows himself a step back.

He’s still looking at her, not sure what to do.

“Apologize!” she yells at him.

“What?”

“I’m not mumbling, and you’re not deaf!”

“Okay, try this, ‘ _why?_ ”

“Why?”

“Yes, why?”

She shoves his shoulder, and again he takes a step back. “You did it on purpose! Full command blacks, with your cloak, with your,” she slaps his arm, “mark of rank, and the” he yanks his lightsaber out of the way before she can hit it. He tosses it onto his bed, not wanting it too close. “lightsaber. You hate hiding and the first chance you got, you leaped out in front of everyone!”

He’s too stunned to even come up with anything for a moment, and then, “On purpose? You think I conjured that _thing_ up out of the ethers?  You think _I_ spiked your panic? You think it’s on _me_ that you screamed out into the universe in fear? It is _not my fault_ that you got scared.”

“It’s your fault you came!”

“You were scared! A trillion kilometers away, I’m having a nice little chat about tightening up my supply lines and how we can minimize the time our troops spend in transit, and suddenly my entire body lights up in heart-stopping fear, and for a second I don’t know what’s going on and then it hits, it’s _you._ I’m not scared; I’m just fine. I’m talking. But you _were scared,_ and as soon as I knew that… I don’t fucking care if the entire universe saw, if I ever feel that again, I’m going to you, and if I’m in my blacks, or naked, or… anything… And I will _not_ apologize for that because you are safe and alive and I don’t care if you’re angry, because you’re breathing!” He lets it pour out of him in a fast tirade, and he yanks her close, kissing her hard.

She shoves him back again. “No! NO! You do not… Everything I’ve worked for. The town, the children, the… EVERYTHING! It all falls apart _._ They SAW YOU! _”_ She’s yelling at him, not quite the top of her voice, but close.

“Then it falls apart!” He’s yelling, too. “If they won’t work with you toward this with me as part of the deal _fuck them!_ I’m as much part of the balance as you are! And it doesn’t work if there’s only one of us, so… No. You get scared, and I come. That’s the end of it.”

“It’ll break! More than a year…” She’s halfway between crying and spitting.

“As long as you’re alive you can start over! Trust me, I know all about changing your name, burning your past, and starting over. And I’m learning about finding people who want what you want and will help you get there. But you can’t do that if you’re dead, and… NO… That is not a risk I’m willing to accept, not if I can do something about it.”

“I wasn’t in any danger!” She shoves him again. He grabs the lightstaff and throws it aside.

She whips it back, and he stops it, hovering in the air. “You were afraid, or I wouldn’t have known, and if you want to fight me, I’m game, but I’ve got enough scars from you, so not with that.”

The lightstaff clatters to the floor as she drops it, and he shoots it to the edge of the room, so neither of them trips on it.

She launches herself at him, so angry she can’t see straight, about to hit him but… There’s a part inside of her that rolls over in a slow, shamed curdle at the idea, this man’s been hit way too many times, especially by people he valued, and she just _can’t._ But the feeling is too raw, too intense, too dark and hot to just sit there and take it, so she flips it, and in a second she’s on him, kissing hard, deep, teeth and lips and fingers moving hard and rough on him. 

It takes him by surprise. It _hurts_. She’s kissing _hard,_ and he can taste blood, but he’s fairly sure it’s hers. That thing spilt her lip. She’s pulling his hair, yanking it out of its knot, so hard his scalp stings, and he’s never gotten this hard, this fast. He knows she’s close enough to his mind to feel how this is effecting him. He’s throbbing in all the right and wrong ways.

“You can’t just… come running in…” She kisses him between words, biting his lip. Hard enough to bruise, not hard enough to break his skin. And suddenly a lot of whatever it was Hux and Phasma had is becoming clear, and he’s not sure he likes that, but… he _likes_ it. All of his fight, and this afternoon’s emotions, and her anger and frustration, all of it rolled together into this hot, hard, throbbing fuck-fight-run feeling pulsing through both of them.

He turns them, fast, using his reach to pin her wrists to the wall, and keeping the rest of him far enough back that she can’t touch him. He wants to just rub against her. Strip her of her clothing and be stones… cajoolies… deep before she can say anything. But he knows they aren’t done arguing. There are words he’s got to say, too. “No. That’s the thing you _can’t_ ask me for. That’s the _only_ thing you can’t ask me for. That’s the wish that I can’t grant, the boon I won’t even contemplate.”

“I don’t need you to rescue me.”

He steps closer, bringing his body into range and her legs wrap around his hips. He grinds into her, kissing, hard, sharp little bites along her neck. “You need me.”

She struggles against his grasp on her wrists, but she doesn’t let go of the hold she’s got on his waist, doesn’t stop grinding against him.

“You want me.” His eyes are dark, and she can feel how this is effecting him. He can feel it getting to her, too, as more than just a way to burn this feeling off.

She kisses him this time, hard, clacking teeth and clenching fingers.

 

 

“And you’d come for me.” He pulls back enough to look her in the eyes. “You came for me when I was looking forward to the fight. When I had not a jot of fear, you were there to watch my back. If you felt your heart stop, felt me awash in fear, you’d drop anything and everything and come for me.”

She blinks. And then he kisses her lips, hard, a long, biting, bruising kiss.

He pulls back and nods at her, releasing her wrists. She wraps her arms around his shoulders. “Exactly. I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing it since before you were on your own.” He puts her hand on his shoulder, reminding her, vividly that she put a lightsaber _through_ him and he kept fighting. “You don’t doubt I can handle myself.” He lays his hand on her heart. “You know it, there,” he kisses her forehead, gently this time, “And here…” His eyes are hot, dark, staring at her, “And if you felt me fear, if you felt my danger sense fire, you’d be at my back before I got the second hit in.”

She’s still breathing hard, but starting to calm. “If I feel your fear, and come to your side… You lose nothing. What happens when I go back? Is there even going to be a back?” Starting to calm doesn’t make her voice any less intense, though.

He kisses her hard, yanking at her trousers, trying to get them down, but her legs are around his hips, so they won’t move, and this is a terrible position to try and rip them in. He rocks against her instead. “Feel it? Hard, against you. My life… My ability to make life.” He grinds against her again. “And yours. Our lives. Our ability to make life. Our future, writ in days and breath, ours, our children’s… It’s all with _you._ You are more than a school, Rey. The school… It’s anywhere you are. The balance is in you, and you can teach it anywhere, to anyone. Everything in my universe that matters is with _you._ If something happens to you… My world ends. Either the Force ends me with you, or it goes so far out of balance…” She can feel the darkness surging in him at just the idea of this. “No. You can’t… ask me not to fight for the things I love. You can’t… give me a path, a use for my dark, and then tell me not to use it.” She can feel his terror at another promised future slipping away. “You want to keep me from running to the rescue, don’t get yourself in trouble. The next time some gigantic, ravenous, meat-eating turtle, or whatever the fuck that was, shows up, don’t fight it.” He knows that’s so unlikely as to be near impossible. “Or don’t get scared by it.” That’s a possibility. “Call your light to deal with it, and I’ll never know, but if your dark cries out, you can fucking well know I’m coming, and I will _always_ come.”  

She kisses him again. Pressing against him, wriggling, trying to get him to let her legs down. It takes a second but he finally understands. She yanks her pants off, and he undoes his trousers, shoving them around his hips.

In a heartbeat, he’s got her in his arms, up against the wall, and both of them shout when he slides into her. Her teeth close against his shoulder, and he grunts at it, riding the endorphin rush, thrusting harder.

“Fuck… fuck… fuck…” he’s murmuring it, punctuating each thrust with it, his hands cupping her ass, squeezing tight.

She’s breathing hard, grinding against him, arms around his shoulders, using him for leverage, pumping herself up and down. Everything in the last hour is making her skin burn and spark, and it’s intensified by his feelings swirling through her, too. His mouth on her neck, that word, over and over, the feel of his eyes and the naked fear of what would happen if something happened to her, the part in the back of his mind that wants nothing more than to be able to walk around with her, in her town, in the middle of the day, the part, hiding back there, that’s _thankful_ that the charade is done, all of it’s washing over her.

They’re too close. His mind’s been leaking into hers, and the fear of a future alone, the terror at losing the only thing that really matters to him, all of it’s narrowing down to his body in hers and the sparking thrill of her skin against his, and the motion of it, the pulse, the heavy, tight, screaming pleasure of making _life._

Hers, his, their bodies, the future they hope to share, whirled images of Lirium and The Order, both of them in both places, all of it distilled into a sharp, shattering motion of nerves laid bare, screaming for release.

She’s rocking, trying to get him deeper, trying to get more, and he feels it, shifts as he step back, hitches her knees over his arms, sliding his hands to the small of her back, so she can lean back and… “FUCK!” his voice, deep, ragged. That’s it. So good it hurts. So _right, fucking, THERE!_

 

 

The sparks are forming behind her eyelids, and the color’s dropping out of her vision, and her body’s thrilling from head to toes, with the sweet, sweet ache of just, almost, _there_ settled between her legs, pulsing, begging for just a…

He yells, his hips thrashing, coordination lost as he stiffens and spurts, and that last hard, deep, thrust is all the more she needs, her voice echoes his, and she shudders in his arms, body twitching as pleasure steals her sight.

He turns them, his back to the wall, and then slides down it. Both of them sit, eyes closed, breathing hard and fast, hearts thundering, waiting to calm down.

His head is back against the wall, and her head is on his shoulder.

 

 

Eventually, he lifts it, and kisses the top of her head, his mind, feelings, body all quiet. “Now, I can be sorry. I can’t… not come when you’re in danger… and I won’t take the time to change or hide. But I don’t want you to lose everything you’ve built. I can wipe their memories. Keep them calm until tonight, and… I’ll take care of it.” He sighs. “It won’t hold. You asked for three years, one of them is up, and I don’t see this getting to two, but…” He sighs again. “If you want it…” He doesn’t have to say, again, that _he’s_ as much of the balance as she is, and as long as he’s hidden, they aren’t really balancing.

She snuggles against him, painfully aware of what he’s not saying. Of how it doesn’t actually balance if it’s all her. How he’s spent the last more than two years now moving lightward. How she’s moved dark, but not nearly as much. How he’s built and is building this Order into something she could, and should join. It’s not perfect, but it’s at least as good as the Republic ever was, and she would have proudly attached her name and face to that.

How he _deserves_ a woman willing to walk by his side, in the open, and not just be her dirty little secret.

 

 

“I’m scared.” And she is. His plan, a mass memory wipe, won’t, on any sort of real level, work. This is the breaking point and… She’s been ghosting along, reacting instead of taking control and plotting her own course.

Their course.

He strokes her hair. “I know. I feel it, too. All the time.”

And she knows that, too. “What do you want?” she asks, pulling back enough to look into his eyes. Feeling like it’s no accident that that… thing… which had been leaving her settlement alone for the entire time they’ve been there decided to make a fuss, while she was there, spiking her adrenaline, or that Kylo responded to it by running to her side.

 

 

“All of it.” His eyes are wide, and every feeling he’s ever had open to her in that gaze. His fingers stroke over her lip. “I want to rule. I want to shape this galaxy into something… brilliant. And I want you with me, doing it with me. And I want to be able to meditate in your chapel, during the day, and walk through your town, holding your hand. I want to blend your mark to mine, twist those rays so they spiral, and let the entire universe know about it. I want those sprogs to call me Master Kylo, and I’ll teach the little boogers how to handle their dark and make pretty letters on paper. I want a legal marriage certificate with my own name and yours on it, and I want to sign it in front of _everyone_ at the biggest, most fucking beautiful wedding anyone’s ever dreamed of. I want you in silks and satins by my side in our palace, and I want to wake up in our home on Lirium snuggled under deep blankets and play in the snow, with you, during the _day_. I want our children to grow up safe and loved and away from the jockeying for favor that’s this place, and…” He kisses her hard, again. “I want to be me, and I want you,” he bites his lip, “and I want _all_ of it.”

She rests her forehead against his, and sighs. Laid out like that… It’s terrifying, and real, and she can feel the ache of desiring it, and the nervousness of fucking it up, and… She takes a deep breath, feeling like she’s about to leap off of a cliff. “Okay.” _Catch me._

 _Always._ He nods, smiling brilliantly. “Okay. Now what?”

“I go home and see… what’s happened. Deal with the fallout, and draw the line in the sand. Either they’re coming with us, or they’re not.”

That rushes through him, and he squeezes her gently.

“Shall I come with you?”

“Let me lay some groundwork, first. I’d rather you weren’t deflecting blaster fire your first few seconds out in the open.”

He half-smiles at that.

She does, too. She kisses him, quickly, glancing at the chronometer. It’s only been fifteen minutes, but she’s sure to her students that feels like forever. “I should get back. They’re probably terrified.”

He nods. “And my commanders are likely in my office gossiping. I was mid-sentence when I vanished.”

She rolls her eyes at that, and they kiss again. She stands up, knees still a little shaky, and begins looking around for something to wipe up with. Kylo stands up, too, and calls a towel to her, and one for him. He stands, wipes up, enjoying watching her put her pants on.

She smiles at him, and flashes out, back to her students.

Kylo rights his pants, making sure his tunic and shirt are hanging properly and… He notices that there’s some… filth, from whatever that creature was, on his tunic. He undresses, takes a quick dip in his pool, and then redresses, putting on clean clothing. Wet hair is a little more intimacy than he normally allows his underlings, but, with any luck, they actually left when he dismissed them.

Then, as he’s heading to the refresher, going to brush out his hair, he gets a look at himself. Wet hair is the least of the ‘intimacy.’ His command blacks cover just about all of him, but there’s still visible love bites on his jaw and neck, and his lips are red and swollen from bites, sucking, and kisses.

And… shit… he still hasn’t gotten the fucking soundproofing taken care of. Okay, that absolutely has to happen yesterday.

He straightens his shoulders, throws his best _fuck you and everyone you’ve ever met_ look onto his face, and finishes pulling back his hair.

 

 

Time to act like he intended all of this, with an audience.

He opens the door, and his office is empty, save for Kinear at the conference table, waiting for him, and C8, who’s staring at the door, looking… Exactly the way he always looks, but Kylo’s getting pretty good at developing a sense for what C8 may be thinking.

“You’ve already called them, haven’t you?” He decides to deal with C8, first.

“I’ve already called physical plant to deal with it. In a day or so, anything that happens in your chamber will stay in your chamber.”

“Thank you, C8.” He thinks about it for a moment. “Get them to sweep for bugs, here in my office, and throne room. I always used to do my rooms, but didn’t think to do the office.”

Kinear smirks at that. “Old school trick. Build shitty rooms, keep the private ones clean, and bug the one next to them. Imperial ships used to do that.”

Kylo sighs. “Great. You didn’t mention that last time?”

“I didn’t think of it last time.” And it’s clear to Kylo he didn’t.

Kylo sits next to him. “Another conversation you’re going to forget and you’d like me to remember?”

“Seems prudent.” His eyes drop to the love bites, and he smirks a bit, his normal, precise, formal manners dropping away from him, and the real Kinear coming to the fore. Then he looks up into his eyes and says, “Take some advice from a man who’s been married longer than your life doubled, there was never a woman worth rescuin’ who appreciated her man swoopin’ on in, guns… saber blazing… when she had the situation handled.”

Kylo blinks at that.

“And if she’s worth rescuin’, she’ll call you when she needs the help. You trust her to know when she needs it, and you’re gonna get on a whole lot better.”

He swallows, too stunned to even be annoyed.

Kinear touches the band on his wrist. It’s the first time Kylo’s noticed it, likely because it’s under his cuff, on his skin. It’s black leather, with a symbol he can’t read embossed on it. The edges are a little frayed, but it’s supple and uncracked. It’s clearly old, but cared for.

“And if she’s worth rescuin’, you get off your damn ass and you marry her.”

Kylo doesn’t exactly smirk at that, because he knows what Kinear must have heard about a wedding, but there’s something vaguely smilish and very satisfied on his face as he says, “That part, I got done.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know you’ve all been wondering for MONTHS now how Kylo’d get outed, and whoever put the bet on Force-ordained attack by giant mutant turtle, you won the pot. ; )
> 
> So, why giant mutant turtle? 
> 
> There are a few things in play here.
> 
> First off Kylo’s greater arc. Kylo is dark. We’re not glossing over that, or prettying it up, or pretending that he’s just moody. Our boy is dark. And dark lends itself to fear and destruction. So, the challenge for Kylo is figuring out what the hell to do with his natural talent for, as he said to Leia, breaking shit and killing people. 
> 
> And if we learned nothing from Tension/Balance, it’s that our boy is ready, willing, and beyond able to apply breaking shit and killing people if it’s involved in protecting/avenging Rey. (Much to the detriment of what used to be Jakku.)
> 
> So, part of Kylo getting outed is that it had to be in the service of his greater arc. It had to be part of him using his natural dark to do something valuable, constructive, and… well… Good. And Kylo’s got no greater good than protecting Rey and the future he has with her. (Like Rose said, “We win by protecting what we love.”)
> 
> For Kylo himself, I wanted him to have a moment where he gets to show up and just be a hero for Rey. And yes, she’s not in a situation she can’t handle. Turtle V. Rey, the turtle isn’t going to win. But… I feel like he needed that. He needed to, at least once, get to feel like he saved her.
> 
> For Rey’s arc, she needed a situation where he came. She was in danger, maybe not a ton of it, but he came for her. The abandoned child needed a situation where she can know, in her bones and guts, that whatever’s coming, she’ll never have to face it alone. That if her back is ever to a wall (or a turtle) a man in black with a red saber will come to fight by her side. (Yes, she is, in the moment, too scared and angry to appreciate it, but in time, she will.)
> 
> That meant I needed something to put Rey in danger, where the others would see her.
> 
> And honestly, I don’t like drama for the sake of drama, and having any of the Lirium crowd turn on her for no good reason just felt wrong.
> 
> Thus Deus Ex Testudinata: Ghost in the Tortoise. I’m sure there’s a pile of lit majors out there rolling their eyes, but… Eh… I like goofy meta jokes. And a throwaway line back in chapter… I don’t know. Ten? Maybe? About how there were turtles on this planet turned into a plot point. I mentioned them a few more times, just to make sure I played by the rules, and establish this is a planet with giant turtles on it, and we were good to go.
> 
> The next chapter is titled Kylo Ren, and it’s a roller coaster, so buckle up, clear an hour or so of your calendar, and get ready for a great Sunday. 
> 
> Hugs and kisses, Keryl.


	52. Kylo Ren

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I couldn't wait. As soon as I got the last image done rendering, I put this chapter up. Happy reading everyone!

12/1/1

 

“Rafe!” Millie yells as soon as she sees it. That… thing is eating the Favier.

He’s fumbling for his blaster, running toward the sound, fear choking his throat and narrowing his vision.

Rey shoots him an angry glare, _makes_ him go back. He hates the worthless feeling that goes with that push. He’s not good enough to help her protect what’s theirs.

But she’s also not wrong. He’s better with the blaster than when he started, but he’s not _good_ with it, and really, he only carries it because all the other men do. If that turtle, or whatever, can’t be scared off by shooting near it, there’s not much he can do without risking anyone near his target.

In the microfarm, with his wife, son, and Jacen, he stands there, watching, feeling useless and helpless as Rey strikes at the giant turtle, doing very little damage, if any, to it, and… His blood goes cold, colder than at the sight of the poor, mutilated Favier.

The Jedi Killer’s found them.

He clutches his wife’s hand and both of them freeze for a second before everything around them shatters in memories of members of their church, whispering reports of different Force sensitive members being executed by a flickering red blade.

Millie leaps when her mind starts working again, she grabs Critt and Jacen, pulling them, fast, through the greenhouse, “Run, we’ve got to run. Straight to the craft. Don’t bother with going to your cottage. Just _run!_ ”

“MOM!” Critt’s yelling at her, they can’t run. Rey’s out there and all of his friends are out there and--

“That’s the Jedi Killer! He’s found us; we’ve got to _run!_ ” Rafe’s pushing the boys out, planning out a path that will keep buildings between them and any line of sight the Jedi Killer may have.

Critt’s trying not to get yanked away by his parents, and he may be getting tall, but he’s still thin and they’re jostling along, fear overshadowing everything else.

 

 

Critt’s eyeing Jacen, begging him with his mind, _Please_

_I’m not supposed to…_

_Please! They’ll take me away._

Jacen sighs, and says, “Stop,” he even uses his fingers, sliding them forward and stopping them as soon as he get to the p sound. (Kylo’s not nearly as good at hiding that move as he thinks he is.)

The Kennas stop dead, and they are _angry._

“That’s the Jedi Killer! We have to run!” Millie shouts, furious that her legs do not appear to be taking orders from her brain right now.

Jacen doesn’t roll his eyes, but he does say, “He didn’t kill me, or Cassie, or Xanth, or Kven. All of us with Order gear. He brought all of us here.”

“He…” Rafe is staring at Jacen, and then shakes his head. “No.”

Jacen releases Critt’s parents from his hold on their legs. “Padme’s with the Order. He brings us here. He’s got status enough to get us stationed away from our original posts, but this still counts for our service years. He got Chewie and Finn off the Order’s wanted lists. He’s got a private spot for Rey to go visit him. He’s been with the Order for years. No one’s allowed to see him up close. And he’s Force sensitive. Who the hell else could he have been?”

Millie staggers at it, feeling gut punched. A small, hurt “No,” eases out of Rafe’s mouth.

“Do you listen when Rey talks? She’s not just filling the air with words. The Force _balances._ Who else is going to balance her? You can feel how powerful she is, right? Even without Force talent, you have to feel it!” Jacen touches his Maji stone. It's under his clothing, but everyone understands the gesture. “Light gray and dark gray. He’s her dark gray.”

“He murdered—“ Millie starts.

“Yeah. I know.” Jacen blows that off. At this point, he considers the whole Jedi Killer thing supremely overrated. “But he didn’t murder me, and he didn’t murder your son, and he’s been here every damn night and done nothing more threatening than meditate. You’ve seen him in the chapel, haven’t you?”

They don’t answer. They do grab Critt, and continue trying to pull him out.

Jacen sighs. _You so owe me for this._

_Yes, just do it._

“Mr. Kenna, Mrs. Kenna…” They look over to him. He focuses on them, focuses his Force into his voice, shapes it, feeling what he needs it to do. If he’s ever needed this spell to work, it’s now. “You saw Padme come to Rey’s aid. Padme. She tossed him her staff and used the short sword herself. They killed the turtle and left.”

The Kennas go blank at that.

“Let’s get back to thinning out the carrots,” Jacen says, pointing to the tiny sprouts coming up.

And, with a slightly glazed look in their eyes, the Kennas go back to thinning out the carrots.

 _You know this isn’t going to hold._ Jacen thinks to Critt as they help to thin out the plants.

_I know. It’s just got to hold long enough for me to get my stuff out of their place and into yours._

Jacen smiles. _You’re staying._

_I’m staying. Nothing’s ever pulling me away from here._

_Even the Jedi Killer?_

Critt rolls his eyes, it’s been a while since Jacen told him that, and he didn’t exactly take it well, but… _Like you said, he didn’t kill you, and he hasn’t killed me, so…_

“Mr. Kenna, it’s lesson time. We’ve got to get going,” Jacen says.

Rafe Kenna nods absently, and both boys leave the greenhouse.

 

 

 

* * *

“That was Kylo Ren. I saw it,” Opal says.

“You did not!” her twin, Tourine replies.

“Yes, I did. Rose was paying attention to the little ones, so I ran to see if I could help!”

“Why would you do that?” Neither Opal nor Tourine has any useful training for this sort of thing, yet.

“Rey might have needed help.”

“From you?” Tourine looks appalled at that idea.

“I’ve got more to offer than you do. And I saw him! It was Kylo Ren, black clothing, black hair, red lightsaber. He leapt up on the tortoise, and shoved his saber though it’s back while Rey cut off its face,” Opal shoots back. Granted, she didn’t actually have anything that could be called a plan for ways to help Rey, but if Rey needed help… maybe a well-thrown rock would have distracted the thing at the right moment, Opal was ready and willing to be the person throwing that rock.

“Why would Kylo Ren come here? Master Padme has black hair, and we know he works with the Order. They’ve all got those black uniforms,” Tourine replies.

“Master Padme has a _blaster_ , not a lightsaber. Master Padme wears normal clothes. And how would Master Padme know to be here?” Opal says, annoyed. It’s _obvious_ who just visited.

But not to Tourine. “He’s Maji! Force sensitive Maji! Of course he’d know to come here. He’s Rey’s sweetie. He’d come for her. Besides, why would _Kylo Ren_ come here?”

That doesn’t shake Opal at all, though she does have to take a minute to come up with a reason for why Kylo Ren would come here. But once she does… “Remember, dark, light balancing, if things get out of balance there’s trouble. Kylo felt the balance slipping, and he showed up to keep it straight. He doesn’t want some new light power showing up trying to knock him off his throne.”

Cassie Andor stretches on her bunk, bored with her hutmate’s squabbling. She’s a few years older than the twins. And like Opal, she ducked away from Rose to try and offer some ‘help.’ She didn’t get very far in that endeavor, because watching the man she knows as Padme leap, red saber glowing, onto the back of the tortoise, she felt something _shift._

Like… a memory rippled and changed and… And she’s realizing that since she knows she’s had a face to face conversation with Padme, at least one of them, that she should know what he looks like, but until she saw Padme leap onto the tortoise, she didn’t have a clear image of his face.

And she does now.

“Kylo Ren is Master Padme.”

Her hutmates stare at her like this is the single silliest thing they’ve ever heard.

“Cassie?” Opal says, her voice making it clear that she’s sure Cassie’s gone bonkers.

She’s thinking back, staring into the image of a memory grown sharp. “I was transferred to the _Supremacy._ A day later, I was summoned to a meeting with Kylo Ren, his personal chambers… He… knelt down, so we could talk face to face, and… He showed me he could use the Force and asked if I wanted to learn. He brought me here.” She looks over to her hutmates. “He’s the one who brings us here. He… hides his face and name because he knows not everyone trusts him, but…

“Kylo Ren is Master Padme.”

 

 

* * *

Finn and Poe missed the fight by, at most, forty-five seconds. They’d been on the lake, cutting ice, getting ready to sink their water intake deeper, hopefully deeper than the ice is going to go. They heard it start, and ran, fast, clearing the buildings just in time to see a very dead giant tortoise. From there, they run to the chapel, where most of the children and Rose are.

“Where’s Rey?” Finn asks Rose as soon as he can see that she and Paige are safe.

“Gone.”

“Gone?” Poe asks.

Rose is staring at the corpse of the tortoise. “Gone. She was… there… and then she wasn’t.”

“Maji stuff?” Poe asks.

Rose nods slowly. She looks around at the children who are still with her. The older ones have returned to their cottages, but the younger ones want to stay close to her. None of them want to get too close to the dead Favier or the tortoise.

Finn knows that nod. He gets across to Poe, by a look, that now would be a really good time for him to come up with something fun and stupid to distract the kids.

Poe glares at both of them, because right now he’s not exactly a font of fun and stupid. Well, if fun and stupid isn’t on the menu… “Come on, kids, lets get some shovels.”

They’re all staring at him like he’s insane.

“It’s cold out there, and Bonnet needs a good place to rest. We’ll dig her a nice grave, okay?”

They’re all solemn, but it does buy Rose and Finn some time.

Once they’ve shuffled off, Rose says to him, “You’ve seen Kylo Ren up close, right?”

“You know that story.” He doesn’t much like telling it.

“I do.” She swallows hard. “All black clothing, black hair, red lightsaber with a red cross guard.”

Finn nods slowly, feeling ice trace down the scar on his back.

“He’s Padme. That’s why he mind wiped us rather than let us see him. That’s why the _Falcon_ got boarded and you were fine. That’s where the money’s coming from. Kylo Fucking Ren is Master Padme!”

“Rose?”

She sits down on the cold floor of the chapel, holding Paige close, voice shaking. “The tortoise was eating Bonnet. It was _screaming._ Rey ran for it, lightstaff glowing, and she got two hits in and then… He was there, next to her. They fought it together. She took most of its head off and he stabbed it through the back.”

From where they are, Finn can see the tortoise, but he can imagine the view of any person out there would be less than perfect.

“No.” He’s shaking his head. “Padme has dark hair, and we know he works for the Order. Officers wear dark uniforms, and…”

“ _Red lightsabers with a cross-guard_? I don’t remember that being standard issue. Neither you nor I found one of them lurking about in the laundry system. There’s one man in the fucking galaxy who carries one of them, and he came, for her. And they’re both gone now. They finished killing that thing, and she turned to him, staff still up.”

“Wait, is she in danger?” Fear prickles through Finn’s body. If Rey’s in trouble, they’ve got to get going.

Rose is shaking her head. “I… don’t think so. He extinguished his blade. He was…” She rolls her eyes. “He was trying to get close enough to make sure she was okay. I think… she was mad.”

“I’d be mad, too, if that maniac showed up out of the blue!” He’s looking out at the tortoise, trying to wrap his mind around this. Trying to find an out.

Rose cups his face and brings his gaze back to her. “Finn… He’s been showing up the whole time we’ve been here. This isn’t the first time. She wasn’t surprised.”

“You couldn’t tell that, not from back here.”

She gives him the, _do you really want to argue this with me_ look.

He sighs. “No. But… Just… No… No!” He’s looking off at the tortoise, looking for a way out of this. “Just… No.”

 

 

“Poe says Chewie’s met Padme.”

“Fine. He… It… Just… It’s not him. She wouldn’t do that to us.”

Rose raises an eyebrow and delicately looks down at the symbol at their feet.

 

 

* * *

Chewie’s in the _Falcon,_ working on yet another repair. He’s hating to say it, but… After close to fifty years, it might be time to lay his baby to rest. It wasn’t the greatest ship to begin with, sacrificing basically _everything_ for speed, and now… She’s just _old,_ and a few decades sitting in a desert in the middle of nowhere certainly didn’t help anything, and a lot of the parts Han jiggered up in the first place to keep her moving are breaking, and _no one_ knows how to fix the damn things. Finn’s turning out to be a great trader, and he’s got amazing instincts on which cargo to get, he can feel a good deal from a lightyear away, but he’s worth fuck all as a mechanic.

And Rose, who is a good mechanic, can’t fix something if she doesn’t have the parts.

And no one makes the parts anymore.

He smells Finn, and his anger, and confusion, long before he gets onto the ship.

Apparently that dust up earlier today has resulted in some interesting fallout. He’d heard the shrieking, glanced out, saw the turtle, but Rey had it in hand, so he went back to fixing the Falcon.

Finn’s really shaken, thought, and Chewie thinks this is way too much emotion for a dead Favier. So, _something_ else must have happened.

 _What?_ he asks, not looking down from the tangle of cords and decaying parts he’s fixing over his head.

“Chewie…” Finn’s looking up at his partner, anger sparking in his eyes. “You tell me. You’re the only one who knows and…  None of this, ‘It’s her secret to keep’ shit. You tell me it’s not true.” He yanks off his coat, jacket, sweater, and then shirt, and turns, showing the long, jagged scar down his back. “Tell me the man who did this isn’t… Padme.”

Chewie doesn’t say anything. _That’s_ not a direction he was expecting today to take.

 _What’s got you asking about that?_ Chewie says, putting down his tools.

Finn’s looking up at him like he’s been stabbed. They both know an evasion when they hear one.

“He killed Han!”

Chewie’s long wail indicates he’s aware of that on about thirty more levels than Finn could possibly imagine.

“You let me leave my wife and daughter on a planet he—You—“

_It’s been more than a year, has anything happened to them?_

“It’s a spell. He’s using the Force to—“

_That’s not how the Force works._

“Like fuck it’s not! That’s _exactly_ how the Force works, or do you not listen when you tell the damn story about Obi Wan Kenobi or Luke waving a hand at someone and making them think what they wanted to. There’s no possible way this is happening unless he’s using the Force to twist people’s minds. He’s the _enemy_!”

_He’s family. My family. Rey’s husband._

“You murder your dad, and you don’t get to claim his best friend as your uncle any longer.”

 _I don’t think he does. And for a while there, I wasn’t claiming him as mine, but… even when you want it to, it doesn’t go away. Even when it’s better dead; it won’t die. He’s still_ mine. _Just like Paige will always be yours. It’s not a binary system with an on/off switch. He’ll always be mine. I’m angrier at him than anyone in the history of angry has ever been, but he’s still_ mine.

Chewie lays a hand on Finn’s shoulder, and Finn shakes him off.

_Why do you think we’re alive to even be back here after we got boarded by the Order? He’s the one who took us off the list. If the gossip I’m getting is right, no one in the Resistance is still on it. He’s the reason your daughter still has her father._

“He’s the reason she’s got no aunt, and her mother’s planet was a weapons testing facility, killing off one set of grandparents, and kidnapped me as a baby, so she’s got no grandparents on the other side.”

_He was six when you were a baby._

“He joined up! I was dragged into it, and he _joined!_ ” Finn yells.

_I know. And he ended the kidnappings. And he’s only tested weapons on barren planets. And the Resistance is dead because he stopped most of the things they were rebelling against, remember?_

Finn growls at that.

Chewie’s eyebrows raise because he’s never heard a human master that word.

Finn nods at him, slowly, sometimes Shariwook is the best language to get an idea across. Human cursing just doesn’t have the necessary heat for the right flavor. “How long?”

_Crait_

Finn groans. “She rescued us _from him_ that day.”

 _She rescued him from_ him _that day, too. Just took a while to kick in._

Finn glares. “She’s been lying to us for years.”

Chewie nods. _What’s your wife say? We win by protecting the things we love?_

Finn winces at that. “She loves him?”

_How many years would you put up with a mentally unstable rage puppy if you were only fond of him?_

“None. But I wouldn’t fall in love with one in the first place.”

_I know. Humans are weird when it comes to sex._

“Oh, God! I didn’t need to think about that,” Finn says, wincing, a whole slew of images stampeding through his mind that he never, ever wanted to get within a light year of contemplating.

Chewie laughs at him.

Finn puts his shirt back on. “So you’re just… fine with this?”

Chewie lets him see the flash of anger, there’s still a _lot_ between him and Kylo who was Ben. _No, we’re not_ fine. _We will_ never _be fine. But he’s still mine. I was the first person to hold him who wasn’t Han or Leia. They… Han and I didn’t think giving him to Luke was a good idea. But Leia won that argument, and for a long time he seemed better… and then he_ wasn’t.”

Chewie hands Finn a tool. If he’s here, he might as well be working.

 _Paige is perfect. She’s everything you want a little girl to be. Ben_ wasn’t _. We could all feel the dark in him._ I _could feel it. Han could feel it. Even as a baby, it was always there. He’s actually better now than he used to be. Used to be you couldn’t get within a hundred meters of him without feeling a shiver down your spine and depressed._

“Maybe _you_ can do that.” Finn glares at Chewie, certain he’s _never_ going to be able to be in the same room with Ren and not immediately flash back to the fight on Starkiller.

Chewie gives him a look that indicates he thinks that’s a fair point. He keeps talking though. _Han and I thought maybe… we could shape that dark, use it…_  Chewie looks around at the Falcon, and looks to Finn. _There’s a lot a man with a good head and a not too stringent respect for the law can do with his life. And, it’s not like an intimidating presence is a drawback in this line of work. Not like either of us were strangers to the dark. Not like we didn’t live and thrive in it for decades. Leia and Luke could feel the dark, too, and they wanted to banish it. They were afraid that if it was just let to grow, we’d have another Vader on our hands._

“So he went off to Luke and turned into Vader mark II.”

Chewie howls his agreement at that. _Han and I talk about that sometimes._

“Talked?”

Chewie gives Finn the side eye. _Did I stutter? Talk. Just because you don’t see him, doesn’t mean I don’t. He’s dead, not gone. No one’s ever truly gone._

Finn’s not convinced about that, but decides that right now is a good time to not argue about it. If Chewie’s having hallucinations about his best friend dropping by to chat, he’s not going to poke it. 

Chewie sees the way Finn’s staring past everything around him, stuck in memories and plans. _Don’t do something stupid._

“I…”

_Want to do something stupid. Don’t. For Rose and Paige’s sake if for no one else’s._

Finn glares at him.

 

 

* * *

He and Poe meet in the center of the town. The tortoise is too big and heavy for them to move without equipment, or Rey, so it’ll just… stay there… for the time being.

Bonnet on the other hand…

Poe’s moving the remaining pieces. The kids are digging… chipping… frozen dirt out of the ground for her grave, but he doesn’t think they need to see… This. “There’s a reason I prefer fighters. No bodies to deal with after.”

That doesn’t sound bad to Finn. He stares at what’s left of the Favier. Then he looks at the tortoise. “We’re going to need to start corralling the Faviers.”

Poe nods. “You find what you needed.”

“Yeah.” He scowls. “What’d the kids say?”

“Apparently, _Master Padme_ has a red lightsaber, with a cross guard,” Poe says, voice dry as the vacuum of space.

“Uh huh.”

 

 

Poe adds, “And Jacen, that little quanrunk, knew it was Ren the whole time, and just didn’t say.”

“He _what_?”

“Ren does some sort of trick on them, so they remember Padme, not him. He couldn’t work the trick on Jacen.”

Finn’s practically got a view of his brain, his eyes have rolled so far back. “Oh, that’s just fucking lovely. What kind of trick do you think he’s working on Rey?”

Poe looks at the severed head of the Favier. “That’s the question now, isn’t it?”

“It’s got to be a trick.”

Poe half-inclines his head, and nods to the Favier’s head. Finn helps him load it into the cart. “Ugh… They’re _heavy._ ”

Poe looks at the parts that are already in the cart. “You think?”

Finn rolls his eyes, again.

“If it’s a trick, what’s the upside?” Poe asks.

“Okay, I know it’s been a while since you got your tool serviced, but you remember what sex feels like, right?”

Poe shoves Finn’s shoulder and shakes his head. “Beyond that. He’s the Master of the Order, he’s practically swimming in sex if that’s all he wants. If it’s a trick, he’s got to get something out of it besides sex.”

“He gets Rey!” Finn says.

“And we love Rey, and she’s great, but…”

“What do you mean, _but_?” Finn’s deeply insulted by the idea that Rey’s not enough.

“But… I mean… If you were going to run it as a trick, and all you got was Rey… Wouldn’t you… I don’t know… Keep her close? What’s he get out of…” Poe gestures to the settlement around him.

“Us building it instead of trying to take out the Order.”

Poe thinks about it, and decides that’s actually a really good point. Ren’s got a decent number of his enemies here… Okay, no he doesn’t. He’s got new enemies these days, and what’s left of the Resistance aren’t even on the list of dangers for him. But, Rey’s a different story. She’s the only one who can likely even start an attack against him that might matter, so she’s the only one he needs to keep distracted. And… well… this is distracted, right? “Okay. Say it’s a trick...”

“It’s a trick. It’s got to be a trick.”

“Fine, it’s a trick. It’s a trick so tricky _Rey’s_ falling for it. Last I checked, I’ve got no Force skills and you’re not exactly covered in them, either. How do we fix this?”

That stumps both of them for a moment. And it stumps them for just a moment because that’s when Jacen decides to quit listening in and let them see him.

There’s a certain tone that too-smart-for-their-own-good adolescents use with adults when they’re feeling cocky and safe, and on top of that, know more than said adults do. Jacen’s using that tone and has it amped to the max. “It’s a Force bond. You can see it on both of them if you’ve got the talent for it. Kind of glowy, blue red, like Rey’s lightstaff. It threads through them, ties them to each other. It’s brighter when they’re close to each other, hums a bit when they’re happy, and sometimes, during the day, I’ll see it spike a bit, and Rey looks far away. I assume that’s when they’re thinking of each other. You might be able to damp it down some with enough distance, but I don’t think you can break it.”

Finn turns to him. “You knew the whole time you were here who he is.”

 

 

“Of course.” He offers a little shrug that indicates it was blatantly obvious to anyone who just _looked._

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

Jacen looks up at both of them, and says, “My master kept me as a side-show freak for a carnival. The magical levitating boy who tells fortunes. And if I don’t whisper something about a _generous_ donation to his coffers during each fortune, I’m going to be whipped into the next week.” He points to the brand on his face. “That’s the least of them. Don’t ever look at my back if you don’t want to get sick to your stomach.

“Try to escape your bond, and you wouldn’t make it. Everywhere on planet knew that mark. Anyone with my face was barred from the space ports. We rolled into a city with one of his recruiting stations, and mutinied en masse. One night all fifty of us turned on our master. He was a droid, so I can’t say we killed him, but I will say _no one’s_ ever going to find all of the parts, and then we burned down his carnival. We got free. Eighteen of us made it to the recruiting station without being killed or recaptured. They took us all. Three years, eleven months, and nineteen days, and I’m a citizen. I finish my training here, and I can go back to the Order and train as an officer. Master Jacen of the Maji. Commander McGy of the Order. People will call me, _sir_ instead of _freak._ They’ll take my orders, instead of staring at me like an animal. Kylo Ren, the man who gave me the opportunity to be more than a sideshow attraction, tells me he’s not that popular here, and I’m better off not mentioning his name, I can do that. He and I are just fine, so why would I go against that simple of a request?”  

“Then why tell us about the bond?” Finn asks.

Jacen smiles, a little. “Like I said, he sold my skills of fortune telling. I can see the future, glimpses of it, and that’s the information you need to make the least stupid decision here.” Jacen looks behind him, toward Rey’s house. “She’s back. Take her away, stretch it out, see what happens.”

Poe’s halfway to turning toward Rey’s when he stops, realizing Jacen used his voice to make him go. “Okay, you little… You don’t ever do that to either of us again.”

“Do what?” Jacen looks really innocent.

“You know what you just did,” Poe says.

Jacen winks at them, and then levitates the torso of the Favier into the cart. “I’ve got this. Go take care of that.”

 

 

* * *

They turn again, toward Rey, and Poe says, quietly. “If we’re trying this, we’ve got one shot at it. We don’t know anything but Padme showed up. My ship’s acting up, Rose poked at it a bit, but couldn’t get it working, so we want her to see it. You get in there and make the transipositor look broken, without breaking it, and then put in coordinates for the farthest chunk of the galaxy you can think of. I’ll get her to come to the ship. Once she’s in there, punch it, and we’ll spin the damn thing out as far as we can get before she kicks both of our asses.”

“That’s a desperate and not particularly well-thought-out plan!” Finn smiles. “I like it.”

Poe rolls his eyes. “You’re lucky you’re so damn cute.”

Finn smiles a little back at him. 

 

 

* * *

Poe is an _excellent_ liar. He has to be. Especially right now while he’s balancing Finn’s need for the universe to make sense with the fact that Rey’s… she’d be horrified if she knew he could tell, but he’s not exactly unfamiliar with the smell of male sexual arousal and release, and she’s been _rolling_ in it, male musk, cum, he assumes one of the very organic scents he’s picking up is turned-on Rey, plus, it’s not like he’s never seen a hickey before, and okay, women may not exactly be his thing, but between the smell and the hickies, he’s gonna assume the pink in her cheeks is a sex flush, not the cold.

Obviously, if Rey didn’t like Pad--Ren showing up out of the blue, they’ve made up, and Poe knows _how_.

Looking at her, he just _knows_ this isn’t a trick. Maybe it’s not good or healthy or what they’d want for her, but it’s _real._

He’s got the advantage of Rey’s expecting to be hit with a million questions about Ren, so him grousing about how his ship’s going to shit and the transipositor’s not working right takes her completely off guard.

“The transipositor?” she asks, looking stunned.

He’s sitting at her table, looking relaxed. “The transipositor. I mean, I suppose if you want to wait and get the tortoise out of the way, we can do that, and then go work on it, but… It’s bugging me.”

“Deal with a huge, nasty corpse or take care of a transipositor … Okay, yeah. I’ll take the transipositor.” He can see the relief pouring off of her right now. Coming back here after Padme was outed wasn’t anything she was expecting to enjoy. And she’s grabbing for an out with both hands, intentionally _not_ examining it closely.

“Good. Then we can get the tortoise together. If you lift it up, we’ll get chains under it, and I’ll pull it out of town with my ship.”

“That sounds good. Why do you think it was even here?”

“The Kennas say they hibernate underwater, so... Maybe that one got a late move on?” He thinks about the size of that tortoise. “Or maybe it’s big enough that twenty centimeter thick ice is like centimeter thick ice for me.”

“I guess.” She’s eyeing him, expecting to get hit with a lot of comments about Kylo, but he’s spinning a story about the ship. “Has Rose taken a look at your ship?”

“She’s still got the sprogs, remember? They’re planning a funeral for Bonnet. Heating up the dirt so they can shovel it out of the way faster than a teaspoon at a time.”

She sighs. “That’ll be fun.”

He sighs, too. “It’s got to be done. We can’t just leave her out there. Even this cold, scavengers will come for her.”

“I know…” She pulls her jacket back on, and her coat on top of it, looks at the rips, holds up one finger, goes to her workbench, tapes the rip in the coat shut, and follows Poe to his ship.

 

 

* * *

They get to Poe’s ship, and Rey heads in. And in. And in. The transipositor’s awfully deep in the gizzards of the ship, and a second after seeing what appears to be a case popped open and three wires pulled out of the bunch, she knows they’re in the air.

As soon as she knows the transipositor is in perfect condition, she wriggles her way out of there, and finds her “friends.”

“Broken transipositor?” she asks Poe, voice dry.

Poe shakes his head. His job was getting her onto the ship; it’s Finn’s show now.

“Of course not. Just… let’s go. Jacen said that if we got enough space—“ Finn’s saying, slowly.

“What?” Rey’s staring at both of them like they’ve gone mad.

Finn pauses, thinks, but she’s fairly sure part of him answering slowly is that every second he’s not answering is another second with the hyperdrive going at full speed. Finally, though, he’s got to say something. “There’s a Force bond, and if we get you far enough away, it might get dim enough that you can _think,_ without it clouding you up.”

If it weren’t for the fact that Finn’s so painfully earnest right now, she’d smack him. Not trying to damage him or anything, just hard enough to put a little sense into his head.

She’d expected them to be angry about her lying to them. The idea that it’s out of her hands, that’s she’s been… “You think I’ve been… what… magicked?”

Finn nods. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. He’s _Kylo Ren,_ Rey. Without him abusing you with the Force, why would you have anything to do with him?”

Rey sighs. It’s going to be a _long_ afternoon.

 

 

* * *

Kylo often senses Rey during the day, a general feel for how she’s doing. And she often has a similar feel for him.

And he’s been… keeping an eye on her, is probably the best way to put it, since she’s expecting some _excitement_ upon getting back.

That said, he’s surprised when he feels her think at him, _Come to me, calm and wary._ It’s the calm and wary part that’s surprising him. Come to me ready to fight, _that’s_ what he was expecting.

_Is it all falling apart?_

_I don’t know._ He feels both fear and hope to go with that.

_Armed?_

_You’re likely better off not._

He’s not sure that’s a great plan, but… Like Kinear said, if you’re going for peace, it helps to show up unarmed, and… It’s not like he can’t break a man’s neck with a gesture of his hand. _Where are you?_

She focuses on what she’s seeing, and he can see it. He doesn’t know where she is, a ship, but not the Falcon. _Poe’s transport._

_They kidnapped you?_

He feels her frustration. _They think that if they get me far enough away from you, the spell will break._

_I’ve ensorcelled you?_

_I think that’s the idea. Remember, calm. I don’t want anyone dying today._

_Do they know I’m coming?_

_They will when you get here._

“You’re not hurt, are you?” Kylo Ren asks, materializing in the hold of Poe’s ship, right next to Rey, paying attention to her, as both Poe and Finn stare at him in shock.

“I’m not hurt. They asked me to check the transipositor, and then we were in the air.” She’s glaring at them, and he deigns to look at them for a second before focusing back on her. “And then they were convincing me that I had to get away, fast, before you found me again.”

 

 

Kylo can feel the rage building, and he can see that Poe’s reaching for his blaster and… No one’s dying today, so… He steps over, fast, making sure he’s between any possible weapons fire and Rey, and then says, “That’d be like trying to keep me away from my heart. As long as it beats, I’ll always be able to feel it.”

He can feel Rey’s _I told you so_ look aimed at Finn from behind his back, and he’s appreciating her letting him stand before her. She can read that he’s intentionally offering a protective gesture because it’s something the other two men will respect.

And, for all Poe and Finn had an idea of this moment, it didn’t look like this. Not standing here, in Poe’s ship, with Ren right in front of them, standing between them and Rey, protecting her from _them,_ _holding her hand,_ spouting stupid romantic shit about his _heart_. They don’t know what to do, and there’s a good moment of the four of them just staring.

And then Finn does.

He’s up, hot, angry, enraged, and Kylo lets the first hit land, a hard, tooth cracking punch, and then he freezes Finn where he stands.

He rubs his jaw, wiggling it from side to side. At least one tooth is cracked, but his jaw, thankfully, isn’t. He had just enough time to brace for the hit. “You’ve already marked me once. That was enough.” He glances to Poe. “And you saw what happened the last time you turned a blaster on me. I can stop it, but I can’t change its course or dissipate the blast. I’ll let him hit me, but I’m not going to let you shoot me. Unless you want to blow a hole in the ship I will teleport her and I, but not you, out of, don’t try it.”

There’s an alcove with benches on both sides, and Kylo turns to it, offering his back to Poe, daring him to try, but he doesn’t. Then he sits, and Rey goes to him, sitting on his lap. She strokes his face, paying attention to the cracked tooth, and he feels her light mending it.

He rests his forehead against hers for a moment, offering a silent bit of thanks. The last thing he needs is a throbbing tooth to go along with the rest of this. He can use pain to fuel his fight. He doesn’t think it’ll be good for trying to smooth things over and calm them down.

Poe looks hurt, and if Finn could move, he’d likely moan in pain at this little bit of domestic comfort. Or maybe at the throb from his broken fist. Either way, he’s hurting.

Kylo releases him. And this time Finn doesn’t charge. He stays back, wary, cradling his hand. He could have punched a rock and done less damage to himself, at least two of his fingers are broken. Rey sees him, starts to rise, to offer to heal him, and he shakes his head, no.  

Kylo says to both of them, “You weren’t there, and you weren’t conscious.” He peels off his gloves, and neither of them miss the ring that matches Rey’s. It’s not identical, but similar, and on the same finger. He undoes his belt and tunic, and then pulls his shirt over his head. Then he touches the scar that trails from his face to his chest, and the other one in his shoulder. “Both of those marks are _hers._ You seek to protect her from me? She’s the only person here who’s ever _beaten_ me. Neither of you managed to do it, and you’ve both had a chance.”

All four of them stare quietly, waiting to see what happens next.

Poe sits down, keeping just as much distance as he can from Kylo, hand hovering over his blaster, but he notices Kylo doesn’t have his lightsaber, so he fists his hands on his thighs. After a beat, Finn follows his lead.

“You said you didn’t turn him,” Poe says to Rey.

“I didn’t.”

Kylo nods at that. “We’re all better off if I don’t suddenly become a Light-worshiping Jedi.” He shudders a little at the idea. “The thing that would rise up to balance the two of us would make Snoke look like an infant.”

Poe looks Kylo over, really seeing him, sitting there, half naked, Rey across his lap, and his eyes land on his chest. “You’re wearing a… the… _my_ Maji disk!” Poe says, startled to see it there.

“Because I am Maji. I know she’s told you that about me. Nothing you’ve heard about Padme is a lie, just misleading. Yes, I have money. Yes, I have access to our records. Yes, I can get Force sensitive children ‘transferred.’ Amazing how I can pull that off. And yes, _I am Maji_. As long as there’s been a Maji, I’ve been one. I was there when she started to see how this was supposed to work.”

“I saw how it was supposed to work because of my relationship with him.”

“She lightens my black and I darken her white and together we find gray and the Force actually, finally balances and the galaxy is more or less at peace. Wasn’t that the goal?” Kylo says, deadpan.

“You’re evil.” Finn’s glaring at him. “That’s not… darkening or lightening or… we’re not talking about passion verses calm, or Critt being in a pissy mood, we’re talking murder.”

Kylo’s beyond over that. He rolls his eyes, points to Finn and Poe, and says, “Of the three of us, I’m the only one with a kill count of fewer than a million people, let alone more than a hundred thousand children, so, tread lightly if you’re going to call anything I’ve done evil and not brand yourself with it.”

“I didn’t kill my father!” Finn shoots back.

Kylo’s lip curls, and he takes a few seconds to sort through Finn’s mind. It takes him less than a minute to find what he’s looking for. “Can you see the memories? They’re in there, impressions mostly, images. No words, so I guess you weren’t talking, yet. Your father…” His voice is harsh, tense, _jealous_ as he continues, “lived for you and died for you. The last thing he ever did was put his physical body between you and three Stormtroopers. They had to pry you out of his dead hands. Of course you didn’t kill him. There would have been no point. _Everything_ you ever wanted and needed he gave you, until he literally could not give any more. You were his complete world, and he adored you to his end.”

Poe’s staring at Kylo, not terribly interested in Solo family drama. That bit about a hundred thousand children though...

Kylo catches it and says to Finn, “He didn’t know. But you did. You, of all people, should know what you did when you took out Starkiller, and if that doesn’t make you evil, then nothing I did makes me evil.”

Finn blinks, this is obviously a level of this argument that he’s ever thought of.

Kylo’s watching Poe, who he can feel is honestly confused by this.

And Rey’s already on top of where the disconnect is. “Snoke recruited by kidnapping children and toddlers. You knew that, right?”

Poe nods. He knew that, in the sense that if asked, that was part of why he was trying to overthrow the guy.

The “ _Oh shit_ ,” that goes falling out of his mouth a moment later makes it abundantly clear that he never managed to put together the idea that they were rebelling to free those children, and he, personally, led the attack that blew up a station with more than a hundred thousand of them.

“More than twenty thousand more of them on the _Fulminatrix,_ ” Kylo adds, just because he’s feeling like hammering the point home.

Poe inhales, shaky, and then bolts for the head, to be sick.

Finn watches Poe sprint away, and says, voice low and hot, “It’s not his fault Snoke put children on weapons.”

“Of course not. And it’s not his fault that close to 800,000 of the more than a million people on Starkiller were basically brainwashed slaves who had the will beaten out of them, either. But it’s entirely _your_ fault that you blew up the entire planet instead of destroying the trigger mechanism, or the targeting mechanism, or the energy gathering field, or something similar. A blaster is just as useless unpowered as it is destroyed.”

“You would have fixed it and fired it later,” Finn shoots back. “Delaying a few days for your techs to get it running again wouldn’t have mattered.”

“You don’t know that. I killed Snoke less than four days after you blew it up. If you’d disabled it, it would have given me long enough to take care of Snoke.”

“And then you’d have had Starkiller and…” Finn runs out of steam on that one. Kylo’s provided him with no good examples of why he shouldn’t have something like Starkiller.

Kylo’s honest enough that he’s not going to let Finn think he’s a better man than he is. “And I would have destroyed Jakku with it. I’ve had the ability to destroy planets the entire time I’ve been in charge. With the exception of Jakku and one uninhabited moon, I’ve chosen not to.”

Poe’s back, looking green, shaky, wiping his mouth. “Why Jakku?”

Rey shakes her head, and Kylo doesn’t answer.

Finn’s still staring at Kylo, glaring at him, eyes and thoughts hot.

“That’s revenge, not peace,” Rey says to his unspoken thoughts.

“And revenge is only sweet in the getting,” Kylo says. “It’s disappointing, once you have it.”

“And you would know,” Finn shoots back at him.

“I would know.”

“Is that… what you did to Han? Revenge? What, he forget your birthday one year?” Finn asks.

“Among other things.”

Finn’s ready to hit Kylo again, but he doesn’t move, not wanting to get stuck again.

Poe gets it. “It’s a stalemate. We don’t have the power to stop you. Can’t even muster a decent attack. And you can’t do anything to us, because everyone saw Rey leave with us.”

Kylo sighs. “You do not understand the power differential. I can do whatever I like to you. In twenty seconds, the entirety of my fleet can be here.” He taps the comm on his wrist. “We could be in the hold of the _Supremacy_ before I finish this sentence. Dark of night, your ship, her, everything can go back to Lirium, and no one will ever know what happened to you, but they’ll remember you going off on a scouting mission. Maybe you two got eaten by one of those turtles, too. I _choose_ not to do this.” He strokes Rey’s back. “It would displease her.” Then he turns to Finn and Poe. “We are no longer at war. You won. You got the Republic you wanted, or at least the start of it, correct? Snoke is dead. Hux is dead. The First Order is _dead._ That was the point of it, right? Or did you only win if my mother ended up running things?”

None of the four of them touch that. But it’s clear that the idea that they may have won the war has never even threatened to occur to Poe or Finn.

“For more than a year, I’ve been doing nothing to you. For months, I’ve been actively funding you. I bring you new Maji. I wiped your ID from our files.” He touches the token, and then notices he hasn’t put his shirt back on, so he does. “I do not wear this on a whim. Balance, keeping it, supporting it, giving it a place to grow _matters._ So, I was evil. I’ve been actively avoiding that for more than two years now. I _am_ dark. That will always be true, and I do not intend to try and hide or change that. I wouldn’t do it for my parents, I’m not about to do it for you.” He pauses there, collecting his thoughts, deciding where to go from here.

Kylo continues after a moment. “There is exactly one thing you can do to me, and that’s use her affection for you, and her attachment to Lirium as a weapon. So, no, we are not at a stalemate. The question is, how badly are you willing to hurt her to get to me? And how badly do you think I’ll hurt you if you hurt her?”

He stares directly at Finn. _Look to your left and right. Who’s_ not _sitting next to you? Do you really think you’ve got a better claim to revenge than his partner of more than fifty years?_

Finn’s eyes narrow.

Kylo turns his attention to Poe, and he knows he’s got Poe. He’s been wearing a Maji token almost as long as he has, and he’s got just as much invested in Lirium as Rey does. He may not be there for the sprogs every day, but finding them, rescuing them, that _matters_ to him. _Balance_ matters to him. It gives him a place and a sense of belonging and forgiveness for his missteps in the war.

It’s the only meaning he’s got right now.

Kylo nods at him. “It doesn’t balance if there’s nothing on the dark side.”

Poe nods back. “I thought dark was supposed to be me. Rash, impatient, bad at following orders, thinking you know better than everyone else.”

“Who says it’s not?” Kylo responds.

“I can’t believe this! I just…” Finn stalks away from them, heading to the cockpit. They feel the ship stop, and turn around.

Rey’s stroking her fingers up and down the back of Kylo’s neck. _That went better than I’d hoped._

 _Good?_ He thinks to her.

_I think so._

_Thanks for letting me take the lead on this._

_I have a feeling this works better if they deal with you, than with me protecting you._

He flashes her an image of him standing behind her, her in full armor, lightstaff extended, yelling her battle challenge.

 _I really hope it doesn’t come to that._ Rey replies.

“Okay, stop that. I’m sitting right in front of you. No talking without talking when other people are around,” Poe says.

“How do you know we’re doing that?” Rey asks.

“Because you’re _talking._ Just because your lips aren’t moving doesn’t mean you’ve stopped all the facial expressions that go with a conversation.”

“Oh.” She says, looking a bit surprised.

Poe settles back on his bench… “So… no Maji gambling?”

“Not the first time,” Kylo responds. “That was just my personal money.”

“But once you lit up at the idea and started talking about what we could do with it,” Rey says, “we decided to try it out for real.”

Poe eyes Kylo. “How do you walk into a casino without getting booted out? Everyone knows who you are, and if they thought about it, they’d know what you can do.”

“If they thought about it. And if they knew. People don’t recognize Ben Amidala.”

“Same as us not recognizing Master Padme?”

“More or less,” Rey says.

Poe stares at Kylo, who stares back. After a moment, Kylo knows what Poe’s looking for. After another moment, he says, “I don’t think you’ll see much of her in me.”

Poe’s eyes narrow, not sure about that. “I joined her security squadron when I was seventeen. Followed her to the Resistance when she left the senate. Fought at her side, went on missions for her, and mutinied when I thought Holdo was taking us in a direction she wouldn’t have approved of. I knew her as well as anyone could. I was the one who noticed her get onto the _Falcon_ and never get off. And I’ll decide if I see her in you.”

Kylo shrugs. “Fair enough. I never knew her well enough to judge.”

“That was your loss.”

Kylo smirks, but Rey can feel it’s a defensive gesture. “But not my choice.”

Another silent moment stretches between the three of them, before Rey finally says, “Now what?”

Poe shrugs again. “Now… I don’t know… We teach balance. You’re, for better or worse, part of that balance. Okay… so… We keep teaching balance. And if some of them want to leave, I’ll give ‘em a lift to wherever they want to go and enough credits that they won’t starve until they find something to do.”

“I brought almost half of the Force sensitive children. I don’t think they’re the ones who will want to leave.”

“Maybe. We’ll see. The Kennas weren’t thrilled by the balance idea in the first place, hate the Jedi Killer, and this is probably the step too far,” Poe replies.

“Trouble there. Critt’s not going to want to leave,” Kylo says, and Poe’s mildly surprised to see he knows who the Kennas are. Kylo reads the surprise. “Yes, I pay attention. She tells me about her day, and I tell her about mine and… It’s a marriage, that’s part of how they work.”

Poe snorts at that. “Until I’ve told half a dozen dirty stories at your wedding and gotten drunk enough to get a hand down your honor guard’s pants, you can call it whatever you like, but it’s not a marriage. Got to have a wedding first.”

“Does that mean Finn and Rose aren’t married?” Kylo asks, and Poe just stares at him. “You were the honor guard, right? Or did you take care of that task single-handedly?”

Poe blinks slowly, unable to comprehend the idea that Kylo Ren just hit him with a really dirty joke. And then he laughs, hard.

Kylo doesn’t let it show on his face, but Rey does feel how amused he is. She mentally pokes him, so he does smile, just a little.

“Good gods, is that a crack of humanity shining through there?”

Kylo rolls his eyes at that.

“He liked your joke about shaft head size.”

Kylo’s eyes roll even further, and Poe looks startled. “You told him that?”

She nods.

Poe sniggers. “That was Leia’s joke. We were on Tremereed, pinned down, taking fire on three sides, waiting for a comet, of all things, to come streaming through because we could use it for cover, and everyone’s so damn tense, we’re all about to jump out of our skins, but there was nothing to do but wait and pray that the next bombardment won’t hit. So, she starts to tell this joke, and it’s not a very good one, and her version that night had like… I don’t know, twenty systems, because we had _hours_ to kill, but it was so fucking ridiculous. I think we were mostly laughing just because we were still alive, you know…” Poe looks across the ship, to the sky beyond... "She was always so good at that. Everything could be falling to complete shit, we’d be outnumbered a gazillion to one, and… She’d just whip out something sharp and sarcastic and _funny._ ” Then he looks at Kylo and Rey, and it’s suddenly very clear to him that no, they _don’t_ know. Rey only had a few days with Leia, and Kylo… whenever it was things fell apart with them, was well before he got to see his mom as anything other than his mom. “Oh.”

Kylo nods at that.

Rey eyes both of them, and it’s clear she’s come to the decision that they can be here, in the same space, together, without her, without it coming to blows. She stands up, and nods to the cockpit, where Finn is.

Kylo nods at her and so does Poe, both of them understanding that she’s got another friend to take care of.

Kylo stands when she does. “Still have a few hours of work.”

“Okay,” she reaches up on her tiptoes and kisses him. And for a second they’re both a little stiff, this being the first time they’ve done something like this with an audience who _knows_ who they are, but… Only for a second.

He pulls back and strokes her face. _All is as the Force wills it? No?_

_You think the Force had enough of hiding and outed you?_

_Just thinking…_

_Uh huh…_

He smiles at her, and gives her another quick kiss. “Tonight.”

She squeezes his hand, and he vanishes.

Poe watches, nodding slowly, “That’s a trick all right.”

 

 

* * *

Finn’s sitting in the cockpit, looking in the direction of the stars streaming by them, but not seeing them. Not seeing much of anything, besides Ren with his red lightsaber trying to kill him and all but succeeding.

He woke up from his coma, immediately hit the ground running, they just about all died again, at Ren’s hands, on Crait, and then they were back on the _Falcon_ , which wasn’t designed for thirty-six people, and Rose was hurt, and… And they had one Psy Ops officer left, and he wanted to just about dissect Finn, so off they went, and it was probably a good five days before things calmed down enough for him to get a real shower, and _that’s_ when he saw his back, and the huge, deep, gnarled scar tracing down it.

He was able to hunt down a copy of his medical records and see that if it weren’t for the fact that the Force smiled on him enough to get him to a _good_ medical cruiser, that would have been the end of any function below his ribs. They replaced three of his vertebrae, and were able to regrow the nerves, grafting a few from his thighs in the places where the damage was too bad to for a regrow.

He can walk, run, jump… anything he’s wanted to do. He’s got enough sensation below his waist that he didn’t notice the difference until months later, when Rose was running her fingers up the inside of his thighs and found the two numb spots just above his knees, one on each leg, apparently that’s where they took the nerves from.

Supposedly, if he’d spent longer in the bacta suit, he’d have a scar like Ren’s, just a thin line down his back, but he got out twelve hours too soon, and instead of a tidy, tight line, he’s got a thumb wide mark from his shoulder to his hip.

He feels Rey, but doesn’t look away from the stars to her. “He would have killed me without a thought. Maybe not you, but if I’d been more of a threat, or gotten in his way…” He snaps his fingers. “And that’d have been it. I watched him gut a man, an old, unarmed man. I was there when he ordered the death of everyone on Tuanal, and apparently after that he blew the whole damn planet up. Gods alone know why. And you’re still with him. You can claim the Hosnian system’s not on him. And he can pretend that blowing up Starkiller is the same as murdering trillions of people, but… Jakku? What, he stub a toe there on one of the corpses he left behind?”

“No.”

“Have a bad day and need something to beat?” Finn’s lip curls. “An _entire planet._ ”

Rey’s eyes close, and she inhales, deeply. Unlike Kylo, who could feel it off of her, if she’s going to tell Finn, she’s got to _tell_ him. “The first time we met, you tried to take my hand and run away with me. I kept trying to yank away. Did you ever wonder why?”

He thinks back… “No. I just figured you didn’t like being touched.”

“I didn’t… Don’t like being touched by strangers. Male strangers. But there was a reason for it.”

Finn knows enough of the world to have an idea where this story goes. He winces. “Oh.”

She offers him a tight half-smile. “The men who grabbed me before didn’t have my best interests in mind, and they weren’t trying to run me to safety.”

“Oh…” He bites his lip at that, and is about to say, “I’m sorry,” when he realizes what and why she’s telling him. “He had an entire planet destroyed because you were raped.”

She nods. “That wouldn’t happen now. But… It was days after Crait, and he hadn’t moved lightward yet. And maybe this is me moving darkward, but… I can’t hate him for that. Maybe I should, but… I can’t. I wanted to. I’ve certainly tried, but I can’t hate him. I never did. I’ve been so angry at him I couldn’t see or think straight, but I can’t hate him.”

Finn doesn’t like the feel of this. He rationally knows blowing up a planet because someone you care for was raped there is _beyond_ overkill, but he’s got enough dark that he can feel the desire for it, and he honestly doesn’t know what he’d do if he had that sort of power and someone did that to Rose or Paige. He’s pretty sure he wouldn’t do that, but… he doesn’t _know_ that he wouldn’t.

“He’s Kylo Ren, Rey.”

“I know. I _really_ do.” She smiles a little at that, too. Sitting in the co-pilot seat. “It wouldn’t work if I didn’t. He’s dark. And I can live with the dark, and I can love it, but I told him when we started, that he’d do what he does, and I’ll do what I do, and we’ll abide or not as we can.”

“So, he just blows up planets and you turn a blind eye.”

“No. He knows that’s not something I can abide. Forgive, maybe, but, no, not abide. But Qualeen… where he took everyone who wanted to go out, and gave everyone else enough notice for them to run, and then blew those cities off the face of the planet… I can live with that.”

Finn looks disappointed. “You wouldn’t have two years ago.”

“And two years ago he would have blown the entire planet to pieces. Like I said, we’re moving to gray. And if we’re right about how the Force works, this is important. This is where we have to go to get the universe back in balance so the next Snoke doesn’t pop up.” 

Finn scoffs in derision. “He tell you that? As lines go, that’s a pretty good one. Sleep with me or unspeakable evil will ruin the universe.”

Rey almost gives him a little shove, but he’s giving off a very clear _don’t touch me_ vibe. “I told him that, and no, it’s not a line. You didn’t have to sweet talk Rose into your bed, and I didn’t need to seduce him into mine. You don’t need _lines_ when it’s real.”

He sighs. “Real…” His eyes roll. “You and him is _real._ So… what does that mean for us? You’ve lied to us for years.”

“I know. I wanted him, and I wanted you, and I wanted Lirium, and I couldn’t figure out how to have it all without lying about it. I’m sorry for that.”

His eyes are earnest, and she can feel this is his last ditch trying to save her from Kylo if not herself argument. “Jacen says there’s a Force bond between you two. How can you know it’s real if that’s true? Would you have chosen him if you weren’t, literally, _bound_ to him?”

Rey closes her eyes and lets herself feel it. It’s been months since she’s thought about this. More than two years since it annoyed her. These days she takes it for granted. It’s like an arm or leg, a part of her.

Finn appreciates her taking his question seriously, and he waits, letting her feel her way through it.

“A while ago, Luke and I were talking about if everything is as the Force wills it. And I don’t know if it is or not. It probably is. That’s how it feels to me. But if it is, then what’s the point? We’re all puppets to fate and magic. I’d said that to him, and he told me that maybe in the cosmic scale of things our choices don’t matter. But we don’t live in the cosmic scale. We live minute by minute and day by day. Our choices matter to us. They build our lives as well as we can build. So maybe this is ordained, but it being ordained doesn’t mean I didn’t chose it and him.

“I chose him as much as I chose to leave my hand in yours and run for the _Falcon_. That was probably fate, too. And you chose to take your mask off, and not shoot, that was probably the Force, but it was also a choice.

“And I think all of this matters. I think our choices define us and where we’re going. And maybe the Force is messing with us, maybe I am bound and have no alternative path, but… I _feel_ like the choice is real, and that it matters, and that I’m going into this with my eyes open, hoping it will work, fearing it won’t, and ready to bear whatever consequences come out of these actions.

“And if that’s any different from what you have with Rose, I can’t see how.”

Finn’s eyes narrow. He can’t find a fault with that, but he doesn’t like it. “And if I feel like I want to hit him every time I see him?”

“I’ll understand why, and really appreciate it if you didn’t. Rose and Paige likely would, too.” Left unspoken is her tacit agreement with what Kylo said. Finn got his one free hit, and that’s it. Another one, and Kylo will hit back. And they both know Kylo’s going to hit a _lot_ harder than Finn will.

That gets a glare.

“Can you abide this, or am I going to lose you over it?”

He closes his eyes, thinking of… everything. Of their home on Lirium, of everything he’s worked for here, of the streaming hate and fear of the fight in the snow, the heartbeat of scalding cold pain when he hit the snow, followed by black so deep he thought he’d never get out of it. He thinks of watching a man in black order the murder of an entire town. He smells blood and feels fear, tastes the cold sweat on his lip inside his mask…

“I… don’t know. Would you ever trust me again if I suddenly brought Captain Phasma home, and promised that she wasn’t nearly as dangerous as she used to be, but… okay… yes, sometimes she still blows up entire cities for kicks and giggles, but it used to be planets, so really this is much better?”

“That’s not fair. He’s not blowing up cities for kicks.”

He shrugs. “I don’t have to be fair. Not about _him._ ”

Rey nods. “No, you don’t.” It’s a statement of fact, not agreement. She tentatively reaches a hand out for him, and he lets her heal the broken fingers, not shaking her off, or denying the touch, but he doesn’t touch back, either.

 

 

* * *

“I’m not going!” Critt says as his parents keep trying to pull him to their ship.

“Yes, you are! We are leaving, _now_!”

Jacen wasn’t wrong about his spell not holding. Critt got an hour and a half, or exactly as long as it took for Savarah, Opal, Magiit, and Xanth to come in to join his parents in the greenhouse and start excitedly talking about the great Padme/Kylo Ren debate and if it really was Kylo Ren and if so, what are they supposed to do about it.

But an hour and a half was long enough to get his things cleared out of his parents’ place, and moved into Jacen’s. It was long enough to meditate, and pull up every bit of calm he could find. It was long enough to rally his dark to defend himself and his life here, long enough to call his light and get into a mindset of victory.

He’s staying. That’s that. This is the first place he’s ever been with anyone like him, the first place he’s had friends, and people who didn’t stare at him, whispering about his future, and he’s not about to get ripped out of here, and… And everything Rey’s said about her friend. Her _dark_ friend. He knows suddenly that she’s talking about Kylo, and all of those bits about how you can use your dark for great things, and how you can use it for terrible things if you let it get out of balance.

He’s not about to leave the best damn chance he’s got of becoming a _master. A dark_ master. He doesn’t have to be a Jedi. And he doesn’t want to be a Sith. But there’s room here for a dark Maji, and he wants that.

But he’s not going to get where he wants to go, needs to go, if he gives in and lets his parents take him away.

“I’m not going. You and Dad can, but I’m not.”

“If we had known—“ Millie says, frantic.

“I know. But I’m still not going.”

“You have to. This is not a debate. _We are leaving!_ ” Rafe says, voice loud.

“No.”

Rafe rushes his son, hoisting him over his shoulder. “You are coming with us. We are not just giving you to—“

They pause for a second, hearing a ship landing, and Critt feels relief washing over him. He’s been begging the Force for backup to come and save him, and it looks like the Force is being kind today. He knows Jacen’s doing… something… at his parent’s ship, ready as the last line of defense, but he really hopes it won’t have to come to that.

Poe and Finn and Rey are back, and they’re not going to let them take him.

 

 

He sends out a plea to Rey, _Help!_ and a heartbeat later, she’s rushing out of Poe’s ship. “Whoa! Put him down!” Rey’s voice. She could feel things were getting troubled. She didn’t expect to see Rafe Kenna manhandling Critt toward their ship.

“NO! YOU LIED TO US!” Millie’s striking out, trying to punch Rey, putting herself between Rey and Critt, so her husband has more space to get them out of here, but Rey stops her hand.

“We are taking our son and leaving, now!” Rafe yells, still moving toward his ship, struggling against Critt who’s trying to flail his way out of his father’s arms.

Critt’s looking to Rey, begging her with his eyes. _Save me._

Rey closes her eyes, relaxes, and then opens them, slowly. “Put him down.”

Rafe does, and Critt sprints over to Rey, standing right next to her.

“You can leave or stay as you like. Poe will make sure you get paid for your time and the microfarms if you leave, but Critt’s staying with us until he wants to go.”

Poe’s behind her now, arm around Critt, blaster still in its holster, but the catch has been loosed.

There’s wild, vivid fear in the eyes of both of the adult Kennas. Millie’s crying. Rafe says, voice shaking, “He’ll come back and…” his eyes are begging his son to come with them, “He killed all of them he could find. We moved nine times to keep you hidden. If… Three years ago, he would have murdered you as soon as look at you. Please, Critt, please, come with us. We _have_ to run!”

Fear is pouring off of him, hot and throbbing, calling everyone here. This level of emotional pain can’t go unnoticed in Lirium.

“Dad…” Critt’s voice is soft, but not shaking. “No. I’m not hiding. It’s not six years ago. He’s not the Jedi Killer, not anymore, and we’re not Jedi waiting to be killed.”

“Then you’ll become him. Another dark terror,” Millie says, voice breaking. “We buried your brother less than two years ago, don’t… make us bury you.”

“I’m not dying!”

“You might as well be if you take this path,” spits out of Rafe. Rey can feel he’s debating a bull rush. He’s bigger than she is, and hoping that if he runs fast enough he can just plow over her and grab his son.

Poe’s blaster is out of the holster, now. Still pointed down, but he’s ready to shoot.

“Dad…” Rey reaches out and gently strokes the back of Critt’s hand, feeling he needs help with this. “It’s just who I am.”

“No! You are not evil. You won’t just… give into this!” Mille shouts, edging left, thinking that maybe if she’s on one side and Rafe’s on the other they can sort of flank Rey and Poe, and grab Critt.

That plan’s dying fast as Chewie comes out of the Falcon, bowcaster in hand. No one’s taking a kid out of here who doesn’t want to go. Not if he has anything to say about it.

And then it’s dead. All of the blood drains out of her face as she sees who’s standing behind her son, in his full command blacks, wind whipping his cloak, saber unlit, in his hand, waiting. She sags against her husband, all will to fight draining out of her.

 

 

Critt doesn’t know who’s behind him; he’s talking to his parents, seeing them go stiff and pale, then sag, thinking it’s them responding to him. “I’m not evil.” His voice cracks. “Just dark. And it’s not the same thing.”

“We shouldn’t have come. You’ve brainwashed him!” Millie spits at Rey, voice and eyes hot, body limp with fear and grief. “You let… him… take them!”

Rey doesn’t respond to that. She knows who’s behind her. She knows what she teaches, and she knows who Critt is. “Stay or go. You’re welcome here as long as you wish to remain. If you want to go, we’ll pay you for your time here. But stop trying to torture your son for being who he is.”

Millie and Rafe look at each other, and for a heartbeat, Rey almost thinks they’ll stay. That they’ll _try._ Then with a shuddering sob, Millie turns toward her ship, and Rafe follows. Poe follows them, to settle up accounts before they leave.

Rey squeezes Critt’s hand as they watch them go.

_I’m sorry._

He sniffs, hard. _It’s probably better this way._

_Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt._

He sniffs again.

_I’ll make sure Poe keeps track of them. In a few weeks, write them a letter, let them know you’re okay._

_They’re not going to want to know I’m okay._

_Yes, they are. Clear your mind, and_ feel _them, Critt. They’re shattered right now, terrified. Give it some time, and things can come back together._

_What if I don’t want it to?_

_Give that some time, too._

They watch the Kennas get onto their ship. And Jacen hop out of it, running to join them.

“They’re really leaving,” Critt’s voice is trembling, and right now, the rest of the Force sensitive students can feel he doesn’t want an audience for this. They start to back away, until they notice who else has joined their group. Giving Critt privacy drops in importance as the chance to gawk at Kylo Ren, in his full blacks, standing behind Critt, as part of the show of force and Force to defend one of their own, takes full attention.

Rey nods. “They’ll be back.” She puts her arm around him. “This is a moment in time, when you and they are having a hard time. Fear is winning out over love right now, but time will pass and what they fear won’t happen, and love will win.”

She feels Critt roll his eyes.

“None of that. That’s why it’s good to have a balance around. I can see the light side of it easier than you can. And you can see the dark easier than I do. And together we get a good picture of what’s coming.”

“Uh huh.” Critt is just seeing his parents flying away, feeling the simultaneous sick betrayal of them leaving and the sharp jab of joy at _freedom._

She nods.

He sounds very young when he says, “How long?”

Rey hugs him a little tighter. “I don’t know,” she can feel Kylo’s words, which feel like they’re much more than a few hours old, “but as long as you’re alive, it can happen.” 

“What happens now?” Critt asks.

Rey looks around, the whole crew is here, even Threepio left his cottage to see this, and, well… She takes a step back, and takes Kylo’s hand. “Introductions. Everyone, Padme, better known as Kylo Ren.” And then she’s on her toes, kissing him, in front of all of them, just like she said she would.

For a heartbeat, he’s a little stiff, not sure this is really happening, but he feels it shift, feels her in his arms, feels all of the eyes on him and her, feels how much he’s wanted to do this, so he pulls her up into his embrace, one arm around her waist, the other tangling in her hair, and he utterly floods her with a sensation of love and approval and knowing she’s been so damn afraid of doing this and appreciating it, and eventually he notices that Jacen’s sort of hooting at them in approval and a few of the other kids, Order kids, are also giggling, and…

 

 

Kylo blinks, amused, when she wriggles a bit, letting him know to lower her to her heels. _Direct,_ he thinks at her.

_Didn’t want to leave room for misunderstanding._

She steps back a little from him, enough so she can turn to face everyone, but keeps her hand in his. “The Force balances. Light, dark, it’s always whirling around us, in and of all things.” She strokes his face. “My balance. My love. My man. The second Maji.” She notices that he’s changed a little since when he left Poe’s ship. His token is outside his clothing. “If this is a problem for any of the rest of you,” she’s looking at the Ticos, “we’ll pay you for your time, and Poe will make sure you’ve got a ride wherever you need to go.

“And for those of you who can abide this, we’ve got a huge dead turtle that needs taking care of, a grave to dig, ice to cut, an evening meal cooked, and… and just because things are exciting today, doesn’t mean the work went away.” She looks to Critt. “Light, dark, in between, the work still has to get done.”

Critt tries a little laugh to go with that, and it doesn’t fall completely flat.

Jacen heads over to him, wraps an arm around him. “Come on. Let’s go finish up with the carrots.”

Everyone who can feel knows Jacen’s giving Critt some time away from too many eyes, and no one challenges it. Though Rey is very pleased to see Elias, Savarah, and Magiit all follow behind, ready to offer comfort to their friend.

 

 

* * *

Rose is slowly walking through the settlement. To her left, there’s the comm array she helped to build. On the right, there’s Threepio’s cottage. She helped to build that, too. The road under her feet, she laid a good chunk of it. The aerial array that allows them to communicate with the wider galaxy, she helped put that up, too. The last thing she built with her own hands before her labor pains started. That workshop… she’s taught children how to build small mechanical devices in there. The greenhouses are behind her. In another two months the blahs and blahs, two rows of each, planted for her, will be ripe. Further down the street, there’s the first home she shared with Finn, the home their daughter was born in.

For the longest time, the Resistance was her home. But that was a feeling, not a place.

And here she’s got a place, and a feeling, and a huge, dark cloud with a red lightsaber just marched through her home in muddy boots, pissing all over the place, making it feel hollow and dirty.

Everything she loves about Lirium is real. Built with her own hands, put together with her love and friendship and duty and…

And _he’s_ been lurking here, hiding behind…

A name and her own unwillingness to poke it.

Thinking about it, who Padme is was bleeding obvious. There was literally no one else he could have been. She didn’t want to see it. And as she thinks of all the times she told Finn to lay off, not poke deeper, she thinks she knew, on some level, and didn’t want to get here a moment faster than she had to.

Because now, seeing Poe’s ship land, and Finn come out, dark cloud hovering over him, and then the standoff, and kiss, now they’ve got to deal with this.

Finn nods to her, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, kissing the top of her head, and gently stroking the top of Paige’s.

Then he winces, remembering getting Paige back from Rey’s a few times, noticing she smelled like she’d been snuggling with a man. He looks in the direction of the black menace, standing next to Rey, looking really awkward as a collection of children all stare at him. “He’s babysat out daughter.”

Rose sighs at that. “Yeah, cuddled her. And saved your life.”

Finn glares _hot_ at that, hot enough Ren jerks, reaching for his saber, looking at him, notices he’s not about to be attacked, and then relaxes. Finn shakes his head, hard, looks at his wife, teeth gritted, and says, “He doesn’t get credit for that. He’s the one who put my damn name on the list in the first place.”

Rose isn’t entirely sure of that, but she’s not going to argue with it, either.

Finn’s warming up though. “That’s like saying he saved my life because he didn’t cut my head off when he had the chance. That’s not saving someone’s life.”

“Okay.”

“I owe that man _nothing._ ”

“No one’s saying you do.”

“Someone saves your life, you owe them. Poe saved my life. Rey saved my life. _You_ saved my life. He didn’t.”

“Okay.” She leans her head against his shoulder, and they walk to their cottage. Once inside, she says to him, “What do you want to do?”

“Go back to yesterday?” he says, pulling his coat off, annoyed, because he can pull his coat off, because they’ve got a new heater, and more insulation, so their cottage actually stays warm now, and, apparently that’s on Ren, too.

She smiles limply at that, taking Paige out of her snuggli, and placing her on the rug on the floor so she can get some tummy time. He sits on the floor, next to his daughter, his hand on her back, and looks up at Rose. “We don’t have to be here.”

“I know.”

“We could go with Chewie. Go back to trading. Call the _Falcon_ home.”

“I know that, too.”

He’s staring up at her as she moves over to their kitchen, getting ready to make some chai. Every important decision of their life has been permeated by the smell of warm, spicy chai. She doesn’t say anything as she heats the water and pours it over the blend of tea and spice, allowing it to steep for two minutes, and then mixing it with milk and syrup.

She sits next to both of them, handing Finn a steaming cup.

“I’ll leave if you can’t stay, but… I like it here.”

He sighs, annoyed. “It’s not that I don’t like it here, it’s…. How do either of us ever sleep knowing _he’s_ a few hundred meters away? How do we… live with him being,” he winces again, disgust pouring off of him, “ _Uncle Kylo_ to Paige? His kids running around and playing with ours. He’ll be there, teaching… lightsaber or whatever… Siphoning the kids off into the Order when they get older, turning them into little _soldiers_ and citizens.”

She can feel what he’s not saying. So she says it, “How do we live with him being a _person_?”

That’s part of it, but not, by any extent, all. “How do we teach, these things are bad, evil, horrible, you don’t ever, ever, _ever_ do them, except for you know, that guy over there,” he gestures toward Rey’s cottage… Rey and _Kylo’s_ cottage, “who did them all before he hit thirty, and half of them he did to us, personally? Oh, and… your Aunt Rey loves him and keeps telling us he’s not that bad, and yeah, he’s got a bit of a temper and occasionally blows planets up, but… you know… balance.” The sarcasm in his voice on that last sentence is withering. “How do we do that?”

Rose exhales, deeply. She takes a sip of the chai, and nods. There’s a reason neither of them wear a Maji token. They’re here for the people, not the philosophy. “I don’t know.”

They both sit, sipping their drink. Paige rolls over, looking up at them.

“Maybe we don’t have to decide anything right now,” Rose says.

He half inclines his head. “I suppose not.” He leans back against the chair behind him. “It’ll be even harder to leave later.”

Rose nods.

“And he’ll just get… more human.” Finn rolls his eyes. “We took Rey out, trying to weaken their bond, and then he was there, holding Rey’s hand, said some stupid, sappy shit about her being like his heart, he can always feel it.”

“He loves her?”

Finn’s beyond skeptical on the idea of Kylo Ren loving anything. He’ll completely buy the idea that Kylo Ren can be possessive and obsessed about things, but love? Please, the man wouldn’t know love if it walked up, bit him in the ass, and took his leg off at the hip. “Rey thinks he does.” He’s also reserving judgement on the idea that the little girl abandoned by her parents and sold into slavery for a few bottles of gin and swept up in a Force bond knows what love is, too.

Rose doesn’t have those reservations. She lifts the cup to her lips, taking a deep sip, and spends another moment thinking about it. “Then we explain it like that. A man can do horrible things. And he can stop doing them for love. And we don’t forget the horrible things, and we don’t pretend they didn’t happen, but we recognize a man can change, and that change is to be encouraged.” She gently squeezes his hand. “And maybe we work on the idea that forgiveness lives in love. And we hold each other to a high standard, and we don’t ignore the bad stuff, or allow it now, in the present, but we forgive it, the past it, for the sake of our current love.”

“You’re a better person than I am.”

She smiles at that. “That’s why you love me.”

“It is. You know that, right? You’re so… lovely… it just lights me up inside.” He leans over and kisses her. She kisses back, warm and gentle. “Forgiveness doesn’t come easy.”

She half smiles at Finn, giving him another kiss. “No one is expecting _you_ to love him.”

“Thank the Force, no!”

“But you do love Rey.”

He nods. And he does. Even with this. Because… shit, he’d do _exactly_ the same thing in her position. Hell, he’s told a _lot_ of lies for significantly worse reasons. Pretty much the first thing he ever said to Rey was a lie. Then he rolls his eyes. The first things he said to Rose were lies, too. Lies told to try and protect one of his loves. “And this. And our home. And… knowing there’s a safe place where we’re doing something good and…”

“Then you’ll tolerate him, for your loves.”

“And if I can’t?”

“Then we’ll move on. It’s a place, Finn. A good place. But it’s just a place. Anywhere with you and Paige is home, and if it needs to be somewhere else, it needs to be somewhere else.”

He kisses her again. “I love you.”

 

  

* * *

“Well…” Kylo leads when they’re together at the end of the day, getting ready for dinner. He’s laying food on the table and she’s pouring drinks.

He decided that, yes, getting ogled by a herd of curious children all asking about him, while moving a dead and increasingly smelly turtle was something he _could_ do, but it also wasn’t anything he _had_ to do, and that maybe another draft of his first year speech would be in order, and skedaddled away as fast as he could port of out there.

And he is not, at all, for a moment, bothered by leaving Rey to answer questions all on her own.

But, the day’s done, they’re back at home, sitting at their table, ready for supper. Just like pretty much every other night since the cottage has been set. Except it’s also, not.

“I guess you don’t have to hide anymore,” Rey says, sitting down, putting cups of water in front of them.

“I… guess not.” Kylo spoons a veggie, rice, bean curd mix onto their plates. Though, with all of this openness now, he’s not entirely sure what to do with it. Skipping about in the snow with Rey may be a nice fantasy, but now that he can do it, he’s actually feeling a little shy.

Rey catches that and adds more on top of it. “They’re all going to stare.” They were really staring at her as soon as Kylo left, and all seven thousand versions of ‘How did you meet?,’ ‘Really, Kylo Ren?,’ ‘He’s not going to kill us, right?’ ‘Kylo Ren?,’ ‘Wait, how did you meet, again?’ (She swears Poe alone asked that one four times.), ‘You sure about this balance thing?’ ‘Ren?’ ‘If Padme is Kylo Ren, why are we here freezing our butts off and not swooping around on a fancy ship?’ (Fortunately _that’s_ the question that got them off of Kylo Ren and onto why they were actually building this place instead of being Order adjacent. And she honestly doesn’t know if Jacen asked that to save her, or if he’s genuinely curious about it.)

He rubs his lips together, and feels his way through how that works, but… “Everyone stares at me anyway. It’s part of the job. I walk into a room. They stare at me.”

“I never got the sense that was a part of the job you like.”

He thinks about that for a moment. “Depends on how they’re staring at me.”

“Like they’re not sure if you’ve saved them or you’re about to kill them.”

He smirks a little, takes a bite of dinner, and then says, “That’s actually pretty normal for a lot of my meetings.”

She laughs, a little, at that. Half-tired, half-amused. “Okay… Well… get your brush warmed up, none of them know how to write.”

He rolls his eyes a little at that. Yeah, he had said it, but… “I suppose, until you’ve got enough training sabers, that makes sense.”

“You want to teach them sabers?”

He spreads his hands wide. This is fairly obvious to him. “You’ve told me that’s what they want to learn, and I’m the best living lightsaber wielder in the universe, I _might_ be a good choice for it.”

She raises an eyebrow at him.

“You’ve got a staff,” he says, pointedly, not looking behind him to where it’s propped against the wall, right next to the door. “I would never seek to challenge you on that.”

That eyebrow goes nowhere as she says, “Uh huh.”

He gently strokes his fingers over her thigh. “How do you feel about people staring at you?”

She blinks. That’s not a question she was expecting.

“We’re… not hiding anymore. And, in a month the first year celebrations begin, so… Let me dress you in satins and silks and stand by my side, Lady Ren?” He kisses her gently. “Be mine in my space, and I’ll be yours in yours and… Let’s see where it goes.”

She licks her lips, feels a very similar flush of suddenly shy and a bit nervous.

“What would we do? I mean… at your celebration?” She remembers his image of her by his side at the speech, him saying that if she’d fight with him that he’d have here there at things like executions, too, and… But she still doesn’t really know _what_ she’d _do_ there.

“It’ll probably be horrifically boring. I’ll give a speech about what a great year it’s been and how next year will better. Then we meet and mingle, and I sit there and look imposing as various peacocks strut about feeling important because they’re near me.”

Her voice is dry as she says, “Sounds delightful. Why do I want to do this?”

He takes her hand in his. “Because you want to hold my hand in front of someone else just as much as I want to hold yours.” He scoots closer to her, wrapping his arm around her. “Because you are my queen, and it’s time the galaxy knows I don’t rule alone.” He kisses her, soft, gentle, his lips just gliding over hers. “And, even if it’s scary and new, you like the idea of being draped in silks and satins, and, for a night, at least, being Lady Ren.”

 

 

She gives him a kiss, and then a quick shove, for naming one of her darker secrets.

“I don’t have a dress.” She knows about his adventures with formal wear, and knows that she doesn’t have anything like that. Her sarees are pretty, but she’s fairly sure they’re nothing that qualifies as appropriate for a formal state dinner.

“I have someone who can fix that.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a post going around twitter, about how to write a novel. And it goes something like this: Think of a joke. Write 60,000 words to get your characters to tell the joke. Boom! Novel!
> 
> Yeah, so, there are a few of those jokes in this story, two in this chapter, and maybe I needed a tad more than 60,000 words to get to the point where I could have Chewie say, "Did I stutter?" but... oh, it was worth it! 
> 
> Anyway, I had a blast writing this, and I hope you loved it, too. More on Wednesday. 
> 
> Hugs and kisses, Keryl


	53. Neighborly

12/4/1

 

Once again, Poe’s whipping up some muffins.

This time, they’re good. Granted, this time, he’s in the communal kitchen, where there are things like flour, sugar, eggs, butter, and a real oven. And he’s got one of the datapads, which has a library of pretty much everything, including cookbooks. (One of these days, he’ll remember to ask Rey where she got this, and see if he can visit. He’s got the sense he’d likely enjoy it.)

Given that, they damn well better be good.

 

 

* * *

Knocking.

On the door.

Kylo opens one eye when Rey pokes him. He doesn’t verbalize a question, but she answers him nonetheless. “You wanted to be out in the open, you get to answer the door when someone wants to visit at the crack of dawn to gawk at you.”

He grumbles a little at that, but not too much. Mostly, because she’s probably right. If someone is knocking this early it likely is someone curious about _him._

Rey being right, however, does not stop him from stealing the top blanket, which gets a disgruntled “Mhrh!” out of Rey, while she burrows further into the remaining ones. He wraps it around himself, and goes to open the door.

Maybe, if this is the sort of thing that might happen often, he should have his bathrobe here.

* * *

 

 

The door in front of Poe opens, and standing in front of him, looking half-asleep, grumpy, wrapped in a blanket, and likely nothing else, is Ren.

Poe smiles up at him, really noticing how tall he is, holding out the muffins. “Good morning.”

Ren looks confused by the offer, blinking at Poe and the steaming muffins, and he doesn’t step away from the door, letting Poe in.

“I take it neighbors are a new and unusual concept for you. Normally, you step back, let me in, and offer me some coffee to go with the muffins.”

Ren steps back, threads one arm out of the blankets, rubs hand through his hair, waits for Poe to come in, closes the door, and then says, “What are you doing?”

“You really are terrible at this, aren’t you?” Poe replies, putting the muffins on the table, heading over to the cooker to make the coffee himself. “This is called ‘being welcoming.’ It’s a thing people do, to make other people feel comfortable in… I guess this isn’t a new place for you, but you get the idea, right?”

Ren nods slowly, still staring at Poe like he’s not entirely sure what Poe is.

Poe pours water into the coffee pot. He can feel Ren watching him.

* * *

 

 

 

Kylo blinks again. The pilot is in his kitchen, having put muffins, that smell pretty good, on his table, and is now making coffee and talking about ‘welcoming.’

It’s not the most surreal moment of his life, but it’s got to be in the top ten.

His lips are rubbing together, and he can’t feel any threat, but… Of all the things that could have happened, this is…

“Why?”

Poe glances at him as he lifts the lid from the coffee pot. He half shrugs. “We’re likely better off getting along than not.”

He’s right about that. Kylo nods at him. He goes to the cooler, and gets the butter, milk, and jam out. “Okay.” He doesn’t have much to say after that, but he does notice there are six eggs in there, so… “You like eggs?”

“I like pretty much anything. You cook?”

“I cook.”

* * *

 

 

 

Poe’s watching him, trying to really see him. Figuring there’s got to be something Rey likes about this man, other than the fact that he’s huge, and muscly, (stupidly muscly. What the hell does he do when he’s not here, bench press fighters?) and smells good (He’s fairly certain Ren didn’t smell this good when he was interrogating him.), and has nice hair. (He’s growling at himself in his head, if this weren’t Rey’s man, Leia’s son, and Kylo Fucking Ren, he’d be beyond tempted to make a pass at him. No, scratch that, as is, he’s tempted. If he weren’t Rey’s man, Leia’s son, and Kylo Fucking Ren, he’d have already made that pass. And likely gotten smacked for it. His father used to say there were plenty of stars in the sky, but it seems awfully clear that Ren’s not in the galaxy where Poe does his stargazing.)

He’s wrapped the blanket around him, tucked it in at his chest, and does, in fact, appear to know his way around a collection of eggs and a fry pan.

“Leia teach you that?” he asks as Ren swirls butter around the pan.

Apparently that’s a bad question, because Ren stiffens at it, and then, not looking at Poe, cracks the first of the eggs into the hot butter. “No.” He’s doing that thing where he chews on his lip, and it’s such a… soft, nervous gesture that Poe suddenly understands why _Kylo Ren_ wears a mask. No one would find this puppy face intimidating.

 

 

He turns to Poe, shoulders hunched a little. “Look, I know… I can feel how you felt about her, but… I don’t have what you’re looking for. I don’t have cute family stories. I don’t have good memories of growing up with her. I was eight when she and my father packed me up and shipped me away to Luke.”

Poe pours the coffee and hands a cup of it over to Ren.

“Maybe I’m looking to get to know you, not just see ghosts of her?”

“Why would you want that?”

Poe takes his own cup and adds a little milk to it. He returns his look to Kylo. “Because it doesn’t balance if I write you off. Because people can change, and encouraging and acknowledging that matters. Because one of my favorite people gave birth to you, and another one loves you, and I owe it to both of them to _try_. Because I’m not dead, and you had no reason to let me keep breathing. I didn’t exactly enjoy what you did to me, but I’ve been tortured by people who meant it, and…” He rubs his left index and middle finger, tracing the scars bacta erased, aware of the memories it couldn’t, and inclines his head a little. Ren wasn’t _that_ hard on him. “So… I figure I should get to know you.”

Kylo half-inclines his head. “Best pilot in the Resistance. You said that when we met.”

“I think you said that to me.”

“If I did, it’s because I got it out of your head.”

Poe shrugs, that’s fair enough. He was the best damn pilot in the Resistance, and he knows it, and that’s that.

Kylo flips the eggs. “That was supposed to be me. That’s what I wanted to be when I was little, before they sent me away to be a Jedi. You loved her, and I could feel that, too. She loved you, or at least you believed it. That was in there, also. She _approved_ of you. You were beaming with that. I could feel how proud you were of her affection. And… I knew she’d feel it if you died. She was never sensitive enough to read thoughts and feelings, not at the kind of distance we were at, but she’d know if you were dead.  She was good at dead, at burying that hurt. But vanished? It’d gnaw at her forever. She’d always have to keep looking for you. It’d hurt worse if you just vanished.”

Poe nods slowly. “Ah.” It’s clear he’s not sure what to do with that.

Kylo shrugs a little. _You wanted to know,_ clear on his face, and possibly in his thoughts. Poe’s not sure if he’s reading it off of Kylo’s body language or actually hearing it. “You said you flew in her vanguard…”

“Yeah. I was seventeen when I joined her protection guard. She was still with the senate then. I followed her to the Resistance.”

Kylo eyes him. He knows that Poe’s older than he is, but not by a lot. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-six now.”

Kylo thinks through that. “Did you ever escort her to…” He realizes he doesn’t know the name of the planet Luke was on. He remembers the coordinates though, and rattles them off. “Would have been about the time you were twenty.”

“Onerios. The Dreamer. Yeah. Twice.”

“Would have been the last two times she visited me in person.”

“You joined the First Order then? That was… right after things got hot.”

Kylo shakes his head, plopping the eggs onto plates. “No. I was there for another eight years. That’s just when she stopped visiting me.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” He flips the eggs. “Luke taught me how to do this. Leia… Mom… she didn’t cook for us. We had servants for that.”

“You didn’t miss out with that. She was a fucking terrible cook,” Poe says with a little half-smile. “She’d mess up tea. Way too many leaves, or not enough, or let it stew so long it’d be tar. Normally, when we needed something like that, she’d make sure someone else made it, and then she’d be good about handing it out, making sure everyone got some.”

“Then why ask if she taught me?”

Poe smirks a bit. “Well, if she had, I might have decided I wasn’t very hungry. Might have eaten a few of the muffins before bringing them over, you know?”

Kylo stares at him for a second, and then laughs at the sheer ridiculousness of this.   

* * *

 

 

Rey comes out, wrapped in her robe, and one of the blankets. She’s pleased to see Poe and Kylo standing next to each other, making breakfast, getting along.

“You two need pajamas,” Poe says, handing her cup of coffee over. “You know you can do more than sleep in them.”

Rey smirks a little at that. “Well, if you’re going to keep bringing me breakfast, I might think about getting a set.” She sits down at the table. “Might not need them all that much longer. New insulation on this cottage… day after tomorrow?”

Poe nods. They’re working their way up the street. “Yeah, it’ll be good to get these cottages all nice and snug. Weather satellite’s saying snow tonight, tomorrow morning at the latest.”

Kylo puts the egg plates down, and sits next to Rey. She offers him a little smile, and kisses his shoulder.

Poe joins them, looking at the cups of coffee. “Okay, here’s one, how the hell did you get a taste for coffee? I never saw her drink it. The First Order didn’t look like it was spending money on luxuries for anyone but Snoke. Did he like it? Did you guys grow it at Luke’s place? How?”

 

 

Rey’s interested in this, too. She’s never thought to ask, because she still hasn’t really internalized how rare this is.

Kylo rolls his eyes a little as he sips his. “Alderaan. It had an ideal climate along a wide band of the equator to grow good coffee. Lots of mountains with a warm, damp in the mornings, dry in the evenings, climate. And, of course, Her Royal Highness, Princess Leia of Alderaan, didn’t have any trouble getting all the coffee she liked. She didn’t like the way wine made her feel, and tea was considered… plebian, it was practically a weed on Alderaan… so, coffee.

“My dad would find it for her. ‘What’s the point of being a smuggler if I can’t lay hands on a few kilos of coffee?’ He was trying to be nice, get her something to remind her of home, make her happy. And she’d always smile and drink it, and… it was never right. I could feel that. It never tasted right, and every cup would just remind her of what she no longer had. So, she’d always make it for me, or anyone with us, or my father if he was around, or… Anyone.

“Anyway, I liked it. And once she knew that, she was more than happy to give it all to me. She’d drink it when she was with Dad, but for the most part, she’d hand it off to me. Luke made me share it with the rest of the Jedi, but… it was still good.”

“Did she talk about Alderaan much?” Poe asks.

“No, but…” And Kylo’s look more than covers how she didn’t have to. Not around him.

“Oh. Is it weird, being able to feel all this _stuff?_ ” Poe’s never asked either of them that.

“I thought it was when it turned on,” Rey says. “I’m a lot more used to it now. But especially when the kids are stressed and projecting, it can feel really strange to just get this surge of something, and for a moment having no idea why I’m feeling whatever it is.”

Kylo raises a shoulder. “Is it weird _not_ being able to feel all of this _stuff?_ All of my life has been spent with other people who were in and out of my head as they desired.”

Poe looks distinctly uncomfortable at that idea.

Kylo half-smiles at him. “No, it’s not as bad as you’re thinking. It was _worse._ ”

Rey raises an eyebrow.

“He’s thinking about being a teenager.”

Poe shakes his head. “No one would have been better off in my head when I was a kid.”

“That was my opinion on the subject, too. The Force didn’t seem interested in allowing me my privacy, though.”

“Ouch.”

There’s not much to say after that, so they sit there, eating, quietly. Eventually, Rey gives Kylo a little mental nudge _keep talking to him._

_About what?_

_Anything. This is good. You feel it, right?_

_Ish._ It reminds him a bit of state dinners. He’s not sure he likes this, but he can feel it may be moving him toward something useful. So, after a few seconds of everyone chewing, he comes up with a question. “Why don’t you have a cottage?”

“Just easier to live in my ship. Got my quarters just the way I like ‘em. Don’t have to worry about if I remembered the things I need. I’m off world enough that a cottage would almost feel like wasted space.”

Kylo can understand that.

“Where’s the next run?” Rey asks, taking a bite of her muffin. “These are good.”

“Those cookbooks in your library are good, too.” Poe breaks his muffin in half, and spreads some jam on it, thinking. “Not sure, yet. Unless I’m looking for something specific, I get out there and kind of just… feel it. Probably need to pick up more feed for the faviers, so somewhere with grass.”

“That narrows it down to what, nine million planets?” Kylo says.

Poe smirks. “Something like that.”

“So… what were you looking for in Gidi Secundus?” Kylo asks, thinking that qualifies as a question, and keeping the conversation going.

Poe sniggers. “Uh…” He smiles. “A good time. I’ve never been there on official business. It’s big enough no one knows me. My size and coloring means I blend in well.” He eyes Kylo. “You were what, half a head taller than everyone else?”

“Enough so that when I attempted to locate something like local dress, I was wondering if you’d picked it on purpose just to fuck with me.”

Poe sniggers. “If I’d been thinking about it, I might have. But, _Mitaka,_ according to your official file, you’re only two centimeters taller than I am, so…”

Kylo shakes his head at that. “Mitaka.”

“He not one of your pets?”

“I don’t have pets.”

“Jon. He’s got Jon,” Rey says.

“Jon is not a pet.”

“He’s your friend. That’s what you mean, right, Poe?”

Poe and Kylo share a look. Both of them have enough command experience to know that that’s _not_ what they mean. But thinking so seems to make Rey happy, so Poe says, “Sure. Who’s Jon?”

Kylo doesn’t want to answer for a moment. Part of him is keenly aware of the fact that he’s sitting across from the highest ranked, living, member of the Resistance, and filling him in on who he relies on could be a bad plan. Another part is keenly aware of the token on Poe’s chest, one very similar to the one he’s wearing right now, and… “My friend. He’s uh… an armor designer originally. If all goes well, I’ll have him building me a diplomatic corps soon.”

Poe blinks. “That’s a leap. Don’t you have… people… who specialize in things like that?”

Kylo sends him an annoyed look. Not annoyed at Poe, but the situation. “The First Order was woefully short of diplomats.”

Poe sniggers a bit. “I suppose that’s one way to put it. So, you’re… really giving this getting along thing a go?”

“Trying.”

Rey squeezes his hand. “Succeeding.”

He rolls his eyes. “A centimeter at a time, maybe. Some days.”

Poe glances toward the window looking out at their settlement. “That’s all any of us are ever doing.”

 

 

* * *

He’s got some time before he needs to be back, and…

Like he said to Poe, he’s trying to do this getting along thing, and…

Leia’d said he’d be useful.

Maybe.

He could probably get his own C3-PO, not like they’re bespoke suits, each one crafted for its individual owner. The programming is the same, the database is the same, the rules don’t vary or change.

But he can’t get one with Threepio’s experience. With all of his mother’s contacts and secrets.

He squares his shoulders, swallows, and heads across the street to Threepio’s cottage.

Kylo knocks, and waits, and a moment later the door hisses open. Threepio stares at him, unblinking gold eyes fixed on his. He doesn’t move out of the way or make any indication he’s going to let Kylo into his home.

They stand there for a moment before Threepio says, “Ben,” voice cold and clipped.

Kylo winces. This is a protocol droid. This droid has _never_ called anyone by the wrong name without their title. This droid used to call him Master Ben when he was _six._  He _knows_ Kylo’s correct name and title. He’s intentionally using his word choice to slap him in a way he can’t with his hand.

“Never mind,” Kylo says, turning away.

“Stop. You’re here for a reason.”

He is, but asking for it feels wrong. _I’ve had nothing to do with you for twenty years, now come work for me._ He takes a breath and says, “My mother said that you were the reason she was able to do a lot of what she did. You made people comfortable and that made them interested in working with her.”

Threepio’s got an electronic brain. He’s got an always unchanging metal face. Kylo cannot, or at least, _should not_ be able to read him through the Force, but he does feel the idea that Leia credited at least some of her success to Threepio pleases him to no end. He gives Kylo a curt, little nod, acknowledging that his efforts helped.

“Would you like to get back into that business?”

“I have a job I’m perfectly content with, Ben.”

“Okay. If you change your mind… I have someone I’m setting up a diplomatic corps with, and he’s going to need help, and… If you were of a mind…”

Threepio inclines his head a bit. “Not you?”

“Not me, personally. Jon reports to me, but if working with me is a sticking point, you wouldn’t have to be working with me.”

“Who would teach here?”

“I don’t know. But I have the feeling there are a lot more teachers in this galaxy than there are Threepios with fifty plus years of political experience in any and every level of government that matters.”

Threepio seems pleased by that. He always liked flattery, especially if it’s true.

“I have lessons planned for the next month. Between now and then, arrange a time for me to meet…”

“Lt. Colonel Jonathan Frakes.”

Threepio thinks about that. “ _Lt. Colonel_ Frakes. Low rank for a man creating a diplomatic corps. It doesn’t sound as if this particularly matters to you. The man in charge of your diplomatic corps should have, at the bare minimum, the title of Grand Marshall.”

“He’s requested it for the time being, preferring the anonymity that comes with a lower rank. He feels like he’ll have an easier time building if he’s got fewer people watching him.”

“Sounds like he’s got some brains in his head. I want to meet my replacement, too.”

“I can do that. There’s one condition on my end.” He waits to see if Threepio’s interested enough to find out what it is, fortunately he bites.

“And that is?”

Kylo’s eyes and voice are cold. “I’m giving you the opportunity to help build the diplomatic corps of an actual government that functions in accord with political principals that you supposedly support. As such, I require the trappings of respect from you. I don’t give a damn how you actually feel about me, but you _will_ use my title. My formal title is Master of the Order Kylo Ren. Master Ren, sir, My Lord, all of them are fine. Here, I’m Master Kylo of the Maji, and as such, Master Kylo is fine, too. But not _Ben_ , that name doesn’t leave you mouth again, not in reference to me.”

Threepio doesn’t appear to be impressed by that, but… well, he can’t be. “I’ll think on it.”

 

 

* * *

Meetings. More and more and more. It doesn’t help that three of the ones he was supposed to have yesterday were… upended… and had to get shoved into today.

But, eventually, he hits the half hour a day he sets for his lunch break. “Kinear, would you join me for lunch?”

“Certainly, sir.”

When the other members of his general staff have meandered out of his office, and lunch for both of them has arrived, Kylo says, “You have a first name, don’t you?”

“Yes, Patrick. My friends call me Pat,” Kinear says as he dabs the corner of his sandwich into the bowl of soup next to it.

“May I?”

Kinear smiles at that. “I’d appreciate it, Kylo.”

Kylo nods. “Good. As for getting off my ass and marrying her, I know you can register as a spouse in the database, and push come to shove that’ll cover the basics, that said, I assume there’s more to doing it _right_ than that.”

Kinear's got a wide grin on his face, as he says, “And you know that because somewhere in that register is a version of Ben Solo who’s got a spouse.”

Kylo smiles. “But that’s not enough, not for Kylo Ren.”

“Exactly, and it’s especially not enough for any future Rens.”

Kylo takes a bite of his sandwich. “Get talking.”

Kinear takes a sip of his tea. “Have you given any thought to how the next Master becomes the next Master?”

“Yes, but I’m rather hoping not to be assassinated in a coup.”

Kinear smirks at that. “We’re working on avoiding that. Assuming you get to give your power away peacefully, how is it going to go? Will they vote you out at some point? Will one of your children become the next Master? If it’s the former, you can set up any sort of marriage ceremony you like, or just register under your real name with your lady. If it’s the later, you likely want it absolutely blasterproof that any child carrying your name is yours.”

Kinear gives him a _long_ look at that one, and Kylo knows what he’s not asking. “Unlikely to be an issue.”

“But not impossible.”

“Not impossible. Though I’d assume any woman I’d gotten a child on would have come forward by now.”

Kinear gives him a look that he understands as, _maybe._ “Likely. But, again, not impossible she’s hiding. Emperors often don’t want a child to pop up, because they complicate things.”

Kylo nods. He can see that.

“Or she isn’t entirely sure the child could pass a DNA test.” Given that two of the three women he’s had the kind of sex that could make babies with were Pleasure Specialists, that’s a legitimate consideration. “That said, first named child has the best claim in any sort of heredity system unless the law specifies legitimate issue…” Kinear lets that hang, too.

“I’ll open it to their vote. Let them decide how I’ll be replaced. Not necessarily _when,_ but they can pick how, and if they go for a vote, if one of my children wants it… I’m sure elections can be won.”

Kinear’s pleased at that idea, and he lets slip a heartbeat of thought of several of his children and grandchildren also standing for election.

Kylo’s not sure what to think of that, but he supposes it’s good. This is how… systems that move the way you want them to get built, right? You put your people into place? Or at least put them into a place where they could then move into power?

“Since you’re leaving it open for right now, you want something… public. You’re the Master, so you get to decide what’s necessary for legal, but the more people who can see your bride, know your wife, know any children you have are hers and yours, and show up _at least_ a year after a wedding, the better off their claim will be.”

“So… Is there anything I _have_ to have?”

Kinear shrugs. “A billion witnesses?”

“I meant… a contract? Vows? A… minister or judge? Someone to officiate?”

“A contract is useful, mostly for clarifying what your… What’s her name?”

“Rey.”

“It’ll be good for clarifying Rey’s position in this government now, and what she’ll be if you decide at some future point to not be married, and it’ll cover who gets what if you divorce, too.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary.”

Kinear hits him with a withering look, and a non-verbal, _don’t be stupid._ “A hundred-trillion other men have said that, too, and lost everything. Get the damn contract written. If you’re feeling stupidly romantic leave out the dispersal of goods, but make sure you clarify her position. As for the rest… Most people get married by their faith, so… what do…” And it’s clear that Kinear knows a lot about Kylo, but he doesn’t know this. “You’re not actually a Sith, right? I know you aren’t a Jedi.”

Kylo shakes his head. “No. Snoke wasn’t either. The best I know, Darth Vader was the last Sith. I’m a Maji.”

Kinear takes that word in stride. He’s never heard it before, but that doesn’t matter to him. There are just as many religions as there are systems in this galaxy, and if Kylo’s got one he’s unfamiliar with, so do a lot of people. “What do Maji do for a wedding?”

Kylo opens and closes his mouth. Then he says, “I guess we’ll find out.” He’s about to leave it there, but… He’s been to _two_ weddings, and one of them, Lando and Annilie’s, he _barely_ remembers, and he didn’t show up at Finn and Rose’s until the actual getting married part of it was over. And, really, Poe can attempt to fondle Jon all he wants, but he’s certain _that’s_ not going to do it, so… “How’d you and Ellie do it?”

Kinear looks surprised. “How did we… get married?”

“Yes. Obviously, it happened, so… What did you do?”

Kinear laughs a bit. “Ancient history. Galactic City, it was Galactic City back then. The Republic was almost five years shy of the Clone wars, and Coruscant had its own military forces. ‘Police,’ supposedly. I was a Police Lieutenant, an ‘up and comer’ known for having a talent at putting down the eternally ongoing insurrections on the lower levels. I was supposed to rise high, there was a possibility of eventually running the Police system.

“Ellie’s family were top-level businessmen. Lived high enough up to have the sun on their face every day.”

Kylo knows that means something, a status marker, but he’s never been to Coruscant, and doesn’t get the immediate reference.

“It was a big deal. They were wealthy, but not politically connected, and it looked like one day, assuming I could get my hands on enough credits to flow through the right channels, I’d be politically connected.

“Her mum and mine got talking, and a month later they’re ‘chaperoning’ our first meeting, seeing if we can be in the same room without biting each other’s heads off. That being the minimum standard necessary for a successful political marriage by Coruscant standards.”

“I take it you got on.”

“We got on. It didn’t hurt that I was young and ambitious and she was heart-stoppingly beautiful and just as smart.”

Kylo laughs at that.

“A month after we met, our parents wrote up the contract, signed it, held a big party, she moved into my home, and that was that.”

Kylo doesn’t wince, but that feels distinctly lacking.

Kinear reads that look off his face, and pulls his sleeve up, so Kylo can see the leather band he wears around his wrist. “Ten years later, after we had a few adventures, grew up enough on our own, and together, to appreciate what we had, hell, after we’d built a lot of what we had, after we learned to be a team, she got me this.” There’s a long, twisty knot embossed into the band. “No beginning, no end. Pull on the strings, and they’ll tighten into each other, drawing together.” He touches the knot. “The silver’s worn off, but the knot is still there.” Kinear takes another sip of his tea. “I’m going to guess you already know this, but if you don’t… A wedding is not a marriage.”

“That part I knew.”

“Good. The wedding is a pretty party. For you, it’s jumping through some hoops to make the future easier. The marriage, that’s every day. You’re in a position where you can have the biggest, fanciest party you like. But the next day, you’re still going to wake up the same way you do every other day. It’s not going to change anything. It’s not going to fix anything. It’s just a party. What you do with or about it is up to you and her.”

Kylo inclines his head.

“So… when do we get to meet her?” Kinear asks with a smile.

“I’m working on that, too.”

Kinear nods. Then he does something he generally doesn’t, hesitate, not sure if he should say what comes next.

Kylo raises an eyebrow at him.

“It’s… different… for women. At least, that’s what Ellie tells me. There’s more… nuance, to everything. They don’t judge on the same standards we do. At least, not in the world she lives in, and your Rey… She’s not actually a member of the Order, right?”

“No.”

“If she ever feels like she needs help, and Ellie’ll tell you, she’ll need help—“

“Ellie would tell you I need help, too.”

“And she’s not wrong about that,” Kinear says with pointed voice.

“Working on that, too.”

“Really?”

“Maybe… I’m encouraging Rey that this could be something we learn together.”

Kinear smiles. A wide, bright smile. “If you get her to agree, I’ve got someone who would _love_ to offer a collection of gentle, appropriate, discreet lessons.”

“I bet you do.” Kylo glances at his plate, notices he hasn’t eaten much of his lunch, and that his half hour of lunchtime is rapidly dwindling away.

When they break up for the next round of meetings, Kinear heads off with a spring in his step and a smile on his face.

 

 

* * *

“Rey?”

Normally, when Kylo gets back, Rey’s in their living/kitchen area. Today though…

He can feel her, in the bedroom, and a sense of wonder coming from her.

Stepping in, he notices that the room is dark, and she says, “Shut the door,” as soon as he steps in.

“Okay… We’re… Oh!” He grins when he realizes what he’s seeing.

Rey’s sitting on their bed, lights off, watching the snow falling, catching the lights of the windows of the other cottages in Lirium.

“It just started,” she says as he heads over to her, sitting behind her, wrapping his arms around her.

He can see that, all of the buildings are looking exactly the way they normally do, and the cobblestones of the street are still visible. But soon… “Are we supposed to get enough to sled?”

“I don’t know. Ten to fifteen centimeters.”

“That’ll do.”

  

 

* * *

It’s late, well past midnight, when a few members of the Maji wake up to the sound of shrieking laughter.

The chapel’s not on much of a hill, but it’s enough. Especially after the first two passes, when the path’s been smoothed down.

More than a few eyes notice Rey and her man… Kylo… on some sort of flat piece of plasteel, sliding down the hill.

Jacen’s the first one to decide this isn’t a private party. He unscrews the legs from his table, grabs it, and heads out to join the fun, Critt a few steps behind.

And after that, Poe decides there’s no way he’s missing out on this.

And by that point Elias, and Savarah, and Magiit are out there, wrapped in their warm clothing, running up to the top of the hill, flinging themselves down it, sliding fast and wild on the packed-down snow.

And Finn eventually yells at them, because some of them have a baby who wakes up twice a night, and sleep is precious, and stop being so **loud**.

Most of the younger kids sleep through the racket. Much to their great annoyance in the morning.

And in the morning… It’s not a rumor, though it might be gossip, that Master Kylo and Master Poe got into a competition over which one of the two of them could sled the furthest and fastest, and both of them got their butts whipped by Rey. (Though there’s some suggestion that just possibly, maybe, he’d never admit it, but Ren might have, maybe, Critt swears to it, gave her a bit of a nudge on the way down.)


	54. Jon Frakes

12/4/1

 

To say that Jon Frakes is a busy man is to understate the situation by a factor of at least a hundred.

Planning the First Year Party… Okay, that’s… Not too bad, fiddly, detail-oriented, nothing he can’t handle. Plus he’s got about ten people under him he can trust to take care of a lot of the fiddly, detail-oriented bits. He’s coming up with the grand plan, and then _delegating._

Go through the current roster of the Order and figure out if anyone will be useful for a potential diplomatic corps. (He jots down a note to see if that, like many of the other things they test for when new recruits join, if that’s something they can attempt to ascertain by testing. They probably can, just have to figure out what the right fucking questions are. He sighs at that and writes a few more lines of notes.) There’s only six million of them, no problems, right?

Kylo tells him he may be getting him some help on that, soon. Something about a Threepio unit, who, apparently wants to _meet_ him and decide for itself if he’s good enough to work with. If he were less stressed out by this, he might be insulted, but right now, the possibility of help is too good to get fussy about the details.

Looking over the design specs of the next class of Order dreadnoughts, to figure out how to design palaces for them. Yeah… because tailoring, armor design, and ship architecture are just so similar to each other. (He’s already booted that off to someone else. They’ll give him sketches, and he’ll work from there. He’s also got a book on order. An actual book, with pages, big ones, filled with pictures of ships, lots and lots of pictures of ships. Once it gets here, he’s barging in on Kylo, and taking up a lunch period to make him look at the damn thing and tell him what he _likes._ He makes another note, better damn well go find a book filled with pictures of actual fucking palaces, too, so he’s got some clue as to what to stick inside the rooms he’s going to have filling up these dreadnoughts.)

Thinking about dreadnought design, and the First Year Party, and the list of guests they’re inviting, which is both bigger, and getting a much higher positive response rate, than last year’s, has him thinking about another of his plans that Kylo liked, namely using the _Supremacy_ as a huge, floating pile of secure, neutral space.

So, right this second, he’s working on some sort of pamphlet talking about what they’ve got to offer, while looking at their staterooms, which are, in the most part, woefully under-decorated (fucking shells of naked gray metal with bloody cots and bolted-down bedside tables, also made of gray metal), and trying to turn the spaces the _Supremacy_ will put their guests into advertisements for why, if any of these well-connected, powerful people who are coming to this thing, are ever in need of a place to work a deal, sign a treaty, or host something they don’t want on their home territory, they should get in contact with a department that doesn’t yet exist, but he’ll have gotten into play by, at the latest (and likely also the earliest), the day before the party starts.

And it’d likely be a good plan if he had rates, or something like that, too. Because, figuring out what a secure neutral space should cost is just like costing out a wedding dress, right? (He makes his hand unclench from his hair. He’s _not_ going to go bald for this.)

It’s as he’s sitting there in his own office, typing, fast, on the proto-pamphlet, that he gets a summons from C8.

Because, apparently, he’s not busy enough.

 

 

 

* * *

Apparently, stressed is radiating off of Jon, or Ren with his magic can feel it, because the first thing he says when Jon gets into his office is: “First of all, anyone in any department you think you can use, you can have. I’ll get the orders written up for that.”

Jon sighs. That should help. At the very least he can put some of the legal guys onto the pamphlet and advertising, and maybe some of the people in physical plant know something about decorating…

But Ren doesn’t stop talking, there. “Jon, can I ask you a major favor?”

Jon raises an eyebrow and tries not to sigh, wondering what _now_ Ren’s come up with.

“I know I am already asking you to do vastly more than you should have to—“

A chill is going up Jon’s spine because Ren looks nervous and that’s _never_ a good thing. “Am I going to hate this?”

“I really hope not.” And there’s nothing of a question in Ren’s voice, as well as a little spark of interest in his eyes.

Jon relaxes a little and looks intrigued. “Ask.”

“I’ve gotten Rey to agree to accompany me to the First Year celebrations—“

Jon’s eyes light up. He knows why Ren called him. “She needs clothing.” He’s grinning.

“And she needs clothing.”

He’s rubbing his hands together, looking very pleased. Something fun and easy and he can just push everything else to the side for a bit and… “Oh yes, _this_ is a favor I’m happy to do. When do I get to meet her?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Excellent.” That grin’s looking very saucy. “So, you going to tell me about her?”

Ren swallows, and Jon wouldn’t call that look on his face blind panic, but he’s certainly radiating a deep well of unsettled feelings. “How about you meet her?”

Jon chuckles, very pleased. He’s the first person on the _Supremacy_ to meet the Master’s Lady, and he’s intending to enjoy it.

Ren takes a moment, writes out the orders, and hands the chit to Jon, who smiles even wider. Because tomorrow, he’ll have more people to get on this.

 

 

* * *

12/5/1  

 

Rey’s pacing around Kylo’s office, not exactly enjoying _this_. _This_ being waiting for Jon to come. He’s due in the next few minutes.

Kylo’s watching her. Part of him wants to say, “It’s okay, you don’t have to do this.” Part of him is aware that she’ll run away if he does. “You’ll like him.” That’s true and doesn’t give her… permission… he scoffs at that idea, to leave.

“He’s from an Imperial family. His mom makes fancy dresses. He’s been trained since birth in good manners and how to behave properly. He’s going to take one look at me and laugh.”

“He is not.”

She glares at him. Then she marches over, holding her hand out to him. “I have chipped nail lacquer.” Her nails stayed nice for a good two days after they got back from Gidi Secundus, and then she built something without gloves on, and that was that. Now the pretty purple and coral lacquer is a collection of raggedy chips, and she doesn’t know how to get them off other than chipping it further. “He probably comes from a place where women never do anything that can chip their lacquer.”

Kylo keeps his eyes and expression even as he says, “He comes from thirty-three decks up and twenty sections over. And he’s an Order officer. He’s been in my office when I had entrails hanging off my desk. I’m sure he can handle chipped nail lacquer.”

She glares at him.

Then they hear the door open, along with C8’s voice. “Lt. Colonel Frakes to see you, sir.”

Frakes takes one step in, and stares.

Kylo thought he’d heard every sound a man could make. Battle cries, yells of pain, shouts of triumph, the gurgle of a lungshot last breath, the wet, squishy sound of life exiting along with the contents of a man’s bowels, long laughs, hard laughs, mocking words, sharp, cutting derision, the strangled breath of realizing you’ve stepped in it, the almost tangible fear of failure cutting a word short… All of it.

But he’s never heard… this… before.

It’s a sharp, high-pitched, inhaled breath, almost an _eeep!_ sound, followed by a rapturous, “Oh GODS, she’s PERFECT!”

He was honestly not aware that a grown man could even make that sound, let alone that it’d come tumbling out of Frakes’ mouth as soon as he saw Rey.

 

 

“Oh… Please… Tell me there’s going to be a wedding, and tell me I’m going to get to design it!” His eyes are glowing with pleasure, and he’s moving closer, trying to take Rey’s hands, but she’s moving away from him, retreating, staring at him in something between shock and horror, a very soft whimpering sound, that save when she’s had nightmares, he’s never heard out of her, either. “It’ll be stunning. You’re just… perfect! He’ll be in all black, with a blaze of silver, and I’ll dress you in sheets of silken pearl, silver accents, we’ll deck out the ship, drape it in swaths of black and pearl and everything shimmering and stark. God, looks at you! You were built for this, we’ll put him in something sharp, tailored, structured, and you’ll be covered in flowing silks, they’ll look liquid next to his solid, black and white and… Ohhhhh! Have you seen Corinithina Orchids? They grow in midnight blue and silvery gray, we’ll twine them through your hair and make a belt of them for the dress and--”

And with that Rey vanishes. 

Kylo blinks slowly, rubs his mouth, thinking dryly at his retreating love _I don’t think he noticed the nail lacquer,_ (He can feel the rude gesture she aims back at him.) and then looks at Frakes, who appears ready to disembowel himself from the shame of it.

He gently touches the scar on his face. “She did that to me. She killed half of the Praetorian Guard. But I think you’re the first man to ever _scare_ her.”

Frakes is wincing. “I’m sorry…”

“Perhaps a _little_ less enthusiasm next time.”

But he doesn’t want to be less enthusiastic. He wants Kylo to feel it, too. “I know you can do it. You’ve done it before. Just…” Frakes moves closer, he doesn’t know how it works, but he knows Kylo can do it, so... “See it.”

Kylo lets Frakes’ image move into his mind, and it’s breathtaking. It’s… a spectacle. It’s the court of an Emperor decked out for a celebration bright enough to make the stars themselves seem dim.

“My mother and sisters… all they do is weddings. I know I’ve told you about them. The most beautiful… You can see it… It’ll be… Perfect.”

Kylo nods. Frakes is looking at him, eyes bright and eager. Jon can feel how much Kylo wants this, but he’s still nervous about asking, nervous about the first word. He’s been invited to use Kylo’s name, but he’s wary about it, still…

“Kylo… Let me go back to them. No one, not me, not anyone else in the galaxy makes a better dress than my mother. She’s got the eye and the touch and… for your bride…”

“You’re getting ahead of me, Jon.”

“Oh shit!” falls out of Jon’s mouth in a single breath. “I… shit.” He cringes, covering his mouth with his hand. Kylo can feel that Jon’s sure he’s put his foot so far into his mouth he’s kicking his own ass with it.

“Not in that direction. We… Not like that.”

His eyes go wide. “Is she already Lady Ren?”

Kylo brushes that off with, “Yes. On any level that matters.”

Jon’s grinning so wide he’s in danger of spraining his jaw. “Except, maybe, an actual wedding?”

“That’s a developing situation.”

“You mean you want a wedding of some sort, and you haven’t talked her into it?” Which would make Rey running away make a hell of a lot more sense.

“Yes.” And now Jon’s smirking as well as grinning. “This… It’s just the dinner,” Kylo says.

“Right, you told me that. The First Year Celebration.” Jon flushes with pleasure at the trust Kylo’s showing him. “But this isn’t going to just be one dress. You bring her to one dinner, and then she doesn’t show up at the next one everyone talks. And just like you’ve got clothing for these things, she’s going to need clothing. And for more casual settings, and… she’ll need jewels, and… shoes… and foundation garments… and… Let me go to my mother. She’ll know what to make, and we’ve got so much better fabric at home. Your lady isn’t made for stiff wools and armor plates.”

Kylo smirks at that. “Actually, a suit of armor for her, at least as good as mine if not _better_ ,” Jon understands that whatever he makes for Rey better damn well deflect any and everything that comes in contact with it, “is something I hope you’ll make. But for this, make some sketches. _Not_ for a wedding gown. Nothing with marks for the Order on it.” He pulls the token out from under his tunic. “This mark, you can incorporate.”

Jon’s seen it before, but this is the first time he’s had the chance to really look, see it. “What’s that?”

“The mark of the Maji.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“No. Maybe fifty people do now, but your grandchildren will.” Kylo tucks the disk back under his tunic.

Jon decides not to press it. Not now. “Your casual clothing... That’s what you wear when you visit her?”

Kylo nods.

“And she’s not a fan of useless, fancy things?”

“Not generally.”

“May I…” Frakes is looking at where the token is under Kylo’s clothing. He takes it off and hands it over. Frakes takes a moment really looking at it. “Is the cage part of it, or is that just how it stays on the string?”

“How it stays on.”

Frakes nods. He hands it back to Kylo. Kylo can feel the ideas whirling around in Frakes’ head, and he realizes he hasn’t given permission to leave. “Go… See your mother and sisters… bring your fabrics back… Make your sketches. But you’ve got to convince her she wants to wear them. And… may I suggest more focus on the fact that that’s a living woman with a full set of feelings and opinions, and not a doll you get to dress up.”

Frakes nods. “Noted. Do I call her…” He leads, but Kylo doesn’t fill in the blank, so Jon tries, “Lady Ren? Mistress?”

“Ask her that when you see her next. She’ll probably tell you to call her Rey.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Kylo’s eyes narrow a little, and he curtly shakes his head. “You’ve already used my name once this conversation, don’t go back to ‘Sir.’ As long as we’re on our own, I’m Kylo, and you’re Jon and… That’s just it.”

“Yes, Kylo.”

“Okay,” Kylo takes a breath. “Let’s see if I can get her to come back.”

 

 

* * *

This time Jon does his best to be _less_ enthusiastic. He doesn’t actually squee, but the delight is clear on his face. He looks to Kylo, “Do you want to be here for this, we’re mostly just going to talk about what she likes wearing.”

“Uh…” Rey says, “I’m right here.”

Jon smiles at her. “You are, but he’s my Master, so…”

Rey doesn’t sigh. She can feel Jon’s paying attention to the line of command, and that Kylo is the only person on this ship who outranks her, according to Jon, but… He does, so he’s asking Kylo what he wants, not what she wants.

Kylo looks to Rey. She shrugs. Part of her would find this easier if he were here. Part of her knows that this is the easiest, softest person on this ship, and learning how to deal with him, one on one, is part of… becoming Lady Ren.

Kylo stands up, gently kisses her, and then crosses his room, picking up a few of his data pads. “I’ve got more reports to read than I have time to read them.” Then he withdraws to his office.

Jon’s glowing at her. “I’m Jon. I’m sorry I was too much last time, but…” he sighs, looking at her with soft eyes, sizing her up, “You really are _perfect._ Every woman in the galaxy is going to want to be you once they see you.”

Rey’s not sure what to do with that, so she ignores it, curling her fingers in so her nails don’t show, and says, “I’m Rey.”

“Hello, Rey. I usually put together dark shapes made of stiff fabrics designed to make the person in it look as big, square, and imposing as possible. Granted, these days he’s got me moving far afield from that. Either way, it’s been _years_ since I’ve had the chance to do something _fun._ ”

“A dress for me is… _fun?_ ”

He’s grinning, wide and happy. The fact that she can feel he’s intending to really enjoy this is helping to set Rey at ease. “A dress… If you’ll let me, more than one, and some just here and there and about clothing. If you’re going to be seen here regularly, and if… Like he has a different wardrobe for when he’s with you, you’re going to need one for when you’re here, assuming you want to go outside that door.” He nods to the door Kylo just exited.

“You made the clothing he wears to my town?”

Jon nods. “That was fun, too, but a different fun. Men’s clothing pretty much all looks the same, and the only real differences is just what size. He’s _huge._ It’s a good thing he’s not in our uniform. I’d have had a terrible time making one look right on him.”

Rey has a little half smile on her face. “We tried to get him some clothing on Gidi Secundus. It was… interesting, and he came away from it swearing he was never clothing shopping again.”

Jon smirks at that, chuckling. “His shoulder-bicep-waist-thigh ratio is _rare._ ”

“So we found.” Rey’s thinking more about what Jon’s said to her. “Why do I need new clothing for just being up and about around here?”

Jon swallows, eyeing her current outfit, trying to figure out a _polite_ way to put it. “Uh…” She’s in her winter garb. Thick boots, long trousers, a long-sleeved turtleneck shirt, a tunic that comes to mid-thigh, and a collection of belts around her waist. He rubs his lips together. “It’s not that the style is an issue,” because it’s not. It’s not exactly pretty, but if she wanted, he could make her a copy of what she’s wearing now. It’d look fairly similar to Kylo’s command blacks, just in lighter, warmer colors. “it’s…” it comes out in a fast rush, “the fabric is rough and cheap and worn, the construction is shoddy, the fit is off, and it would look like Kylo can’t afford to dress you better, and that would look bad.”

Her eyebrow arches. “What I wear reflects on him?” _Her_ reflecting _badly_ on him washes over her in a huge, nervous-making wave. Her teeth grit. This is a huge chunk of why this scares her so much.

“Yes. I mean… that’s true at your home, right? What he wears reflects on you? That’s why he’s got his not-Master clothing, right?”

Rey’s never thought about it that way, but… It’s probably a way to view it.  “So… what does this… need to look like?”

“Style-wise, no one cares. You can look as masc or femme or whatever as you like. You’re not required or even encouraged to wear one of our uniforms, but whatever it is you like, please let me make sure it fits and it’s good fabric.”

Rey looks at what she’s wearing, put together because the pattern was easy, and it’s _warm,_ and thinks about what she used to wear. So much of that outfit was about looking like the child they left behind, and the rest of it was just bits and bobs she grabbed over the years. Besides the few dresses she’s picked when shopping with Kylo, she’s never put anything on herself because of some sense of _style._

“What do women wear here? When they’re off-duty.”

Jon’s about to say, “Whatever they like,” but then he understands what she’s saying. She doesn’t _know_ how women dress. He’s wondering where she’s from, and how Kylo met her, and why she doesn’t know stuff like this, but… Maybe the Maji thing is some sort of ascetic group? That could explain it. And… He glances around at Kylo’s all black on black aesthetic, _that_ could explain a lot of this, too. “Oh. Uh… Have you ever been outside these rooms?”

She smirks a bit. “Once.”

He’s got the sense that _once_ means something, and then remembers Kylo’s comment about Rey having killed half the Praetorian Guard. He swallows, hard, and then says, “Well, it’ll reflect badly on him if you’re wandering about with him in shoddy clothing, but no one watches my companions or makes any judgements about them. Come on. Let’s go for a walk. The F deck is officer housing and recreation, and there will be women there, in all sorts of off-duty wear. It should give you more an idea of what women wear here.”

Rey nods. “Thank you.”

Kylo raises an eyebrow at them as they head past him, toward the throne room, and the wider, outside world of the _Supremacy,_ but he trusts Jon, knows Rey can handle herself, so all she has to say is, “Fact-finding mission.”

 

 

He nods, and returns to his datapad.

 

 

* * *

The _Supremacy_ feels different.

It hadn’t occurred to her that would be true, though, if she had thought about it, she would have assumed that it would have had to be true. No Snoke. There’s a palpable edge of that. Happier, more relaxed troops. _More_ troops.

“How many are on here, now?”

“Party soon, people are starting to come in for that, and we’re finally past where we were when _the bitch_ fucked us over,” even without Force sensitivity Rey would have shivered at how much anger is in those words. She’s never thought to ask Kylo if he’s mentioned who _she_ used to be. The idea that that might be an issue being something that’s never occurred to her. Something to talk about later. “So, a bit over three million of us here right now. Should be close to four point five by the first.”

She whistles a little at that. It’s one thing to _know_ the kind of numbers Kylo commands. It’s another to feel the thrum of their minds and emotions all buzzing about them.

“How many can you fit in here?”

“Full complement is twenty-five million, and close to a six billion kilotons of cargo/ships. Wingtip to wingtip is sixty kilometers. At its thickest, we’re three klicks wide, and twenty klicks deep. If the _Supremacy_ were a city, it’d be a large one.”

Rey can believe that. “How do you even get from one side to the other?”

“Elevators for up and down. Trams for lateral. Most people spend most of their time in one section, though. D, E, and F decks are at the middle of the ship and extend all the way through. That way our people can live close to their stations.”

“Oh.”

Jon leads her to one of the elevators. She’s fairly sure Kylo has a different throne room than Snoke did, and that this isn’t the elevator she was in where all of this really got started, but it looks the same as that one did, and the ride feels similar.

“That’s not Snoke’s throne room, was it?”

Jon shakes his head. “Kylo chose his own rooms. Snoke’s were more forward facing, less well-protected by the rest of the ship.”

“Ah.”

“We’re actually pretty close to the underside of the ship, right now, below the loading bays, facing the engine array. It’s an unusual location, so if anyone tried to slam a ship into his throne room, they likely wouldn’t aim for the right part of the ship.”

The elevator comes to a stop, and the doors open. What’s in front of them is not the sort of thing Rey expected to see. She expects black hallways and black walls and black ceilings and mile after mile of men and women in white armor and lots of cold, hard electronics and… all of that is true, just not on the D, E, or F decks.

“Welcome to the F-deck,” Jon says. “Sixty klicks wide end to end. Right now we’re in the market zone for this subsection. We’ve got two and a half klicks of housing, and then half a klick of markets, and then another two and a half of housing, and on and on. Pretty much everything you could want or need is located here, somewhere. The restaurants, shops, and theatres are open around the clocks. People go on and off duty at all times, so things never shut down. Though it does get quiet around first watch. For some reason, most humans seem to prefer to be asleep then, and we’re still seventy percent plus human.”

It occurs to Rey, that this might not be the most populated city she’s ever been in, but it’s certainly the largest.

“Most of the shops are chains. One every few markets. But, I’m thinking, you’re a fairly standard size, and if you want to blend in…” He gestures to the market around him. “Look around, and then we can go shopping.”

“I don’t have any money.” Well, she does, in the account she shares with Ben Amidala, but her credit stick is back in Lirium right now, and most of that money is either spent and waiting for transfer or earmarked for another project at their home.

Jon thinks about that for a moment. Lady Ren will _never_ need credits on this ship. Anything she likes will be given to her. But today, now, here, she’s just his friend, out for a bit of a stroll and some sightseeing. “I do, and he’s more than good for reimbursing me.”

She looks around. They’re in a massive courtyard, filled with stalls and shops. There are benches and areas where people are playing some sort of game. A few trees are in planters, with some kind of flowers around them. Toward the edges of what she can see, there are places selling food, and between the food shops are open areas filled with tables and chairs.

“Kylo said no one is allowed in the kitchens. I sort of assumed there was a huge cafeteria or something.”

“There is. Twenty of them, actually. Twelve on the D deck and eight on the E deck. Enlisted housing down there. They’ve got shops and markets, too, but you pay out of pocket at the shops, and the canteens are free. Officers usually get food delivered if they’re ordering from the canteens.”

Rey’s nodding absently, looking around. Everywhere, walking around, moving through, sitting at the benches and cafes, relaxing by the game courts, playing on the game courts, are _people._ Tons of them. In every shape, size, and species she can identify. Everything Kylo’s ever said about how everyone in one of those masks was a person is hitting her, really hard, and she’s got a feeling there had to be something like this on the Starkiller, too.

Jon’s not noticing that. He is noticing that they’re fairly close to a popcorn vender, and it smells really good, and… “Do you want a snack? Something to munch on while we people watch?”

“Uh, yeah, sure.”

He gets them a bag of salty-sweet, which is his favorite. Crispy, salty, buttery popcorn covered in burnt sugar and milk chocolate.

After a bite, Rey is rapidly coming to the conclusion that popcorn is a miracle, and that as soon as they get out of winter, they’re going to grow a lot of it, because this _needs_ to be part of her semi-regular diet.

Jon’s chuckling at that, enjoying watching her enjoy this so much.

“Never had it before?”

“Never even imagined it.”

Jon shakes his head a little. “I know he’s never been here before, but maybe one day, he might put his off-duty clothing on, and just try taking a stroll. Wild and crazy idea, you could do it with him.” Jon decides, in an effort to encourage this, he might, in his copious spare time, make sure Kylo’s got some of his casual clothing, in black.

Rey chuckles a bit at that. “Maybe.”

Jon jiggles the popcorn bag. “It comes in five other flavors.”

“Probably?”

“That’s better.” Jon starts asking questions about their home, and Rey’s amazed at how easy he is to talk to. Then she remembers something Kylo said to her about how Jon had told her that being effortlessly interesting and interested is a learned skill, so she asks him, “Was learning how to do this difficult?”

He blinks. One moment she was telling him about microfarms, and the next she’s asking about learning something.

“I’m sorry, I’m not following.”

She half shrugs, taking another bite of the popcorn, as they watch people wandering around them. “Kylo told me you told him that being interested is a learned skill.”

Jon offers her a somewhat embarrassed smile. “It is. That said, I’m also genuinely interested in what you’re doing. He’s…” Jon licks his lips, and Rey can feel he’s not sure about saying this.

“Go on…”

“He’s… not like anyone else I’ve ever known, and… I don’t want to pry, but… I’d like to know him, and you, better, so…”

She pats his hand. “And I’d like to know you better, too. And, I think you’d find, if you just asked, he’d probably like talking to you. He can get pretty lonely.”

Jon nods. “I’ve felt that. Still… It’s intimidating.”

It’s been a long time since Rey found Kylo intimidating, but she can see how Jon might. “He’s spent too long being feared by people who shouldn’t have. He responds well to people who want good things for him not being scared of him. His favorite one of the kids is Jacen, the one who’s not scared of him.”

“Kids?” Jon says. “What kids? You have kids?” The idea that the two of them have children, let alone children old enough for fear and fearlessness to be part of the equation shocks Jon to his core.

“Not… personally. Yet. How much has he told you about what we do?”

“Just that you’re Maji. I’m not entirely sure what that is. Something to do with the Force, right? Like Jedi?”

Rey nods slowly at that. “Yeah. Like Jedi… sort of. Jon, the next time you have an evening off, get your butt over to his rooms, and have him bring you home for dinner. Come see what it is we do. I can talk about it all day, but you’ll get a better idea of it by seeing it.”

“I’d like that. Speaking of like,” he gestures to the people in front of them. “Are you seeing anything that looks interesting?”

“Maybe. It… feels weird to think of clothing without having to think about how warm, practical, and hard-wearing it is.”

He nods. “I can see that. One perk of living on a ship, the weather is going to be the same all day, every day, for as long as you’re here. You don’t have to worry about being too cold or too warm or anything like that.”

“I could get used to that.”

“As for hard-wearing,” he smiles a little, “one of the perks of _good_ fabric is that it’ll last well-nigh forever. Buy some things today just for blending in, and then let me design outfits for you. I promise, you won’t be able to come up with anything that’ll damage them.”

Rey likes that idea, very much. “You know, we do a lot of our own sewing at home. If you ever wanted to teach a class on how to do that…”

He’s looking at her outfit and seeing it in an entirely new light. “How much of this is homemade?”

“Everything you can see but the jacket, boots, and belts. We’re not set up for real leatherworking, yet.”

“Ah… Yes… It’s…” Well, _that_ explains a lot. “You learned from a book?”

“Exactly. Kylo offered to help, but he’s so busy, I didn’t want to waste his time on this…”

He doesn’t exactly wince, but a lot of the construction mistakes he’s seeing are making sense. Then he realizes the first bit of what she said. “He sews?”

“Not the way you do, but, once upon a time, he did.”

Jon blinks at that, tucking it away for something to ask about. “I may take you up on those lessons, if I ever get any free time again.”

She smiles. “I know he’s got you busy right now, but, if you do, I’d appreciate it. We’ve got twenty-two children right now, and we’re working on teaching them… Well, a bit of everything really.”

Jon blinks. “Twenty-two?”

Rey smiles. “I think you’ll enjoy the visit.”

 

 

* * *

It’s a _lot_ of people.

Rey does a little math in her head. If there are three million plus people on this ship right now. And if one out of twenty of them is an officer that’s… Something like up to 150,000 people live on this deck.

And it really doesn’t sound like a lot until you’re in the middle of them, and then it’s a _lot._

It’s also a lot of… women. She feels odd saying it, but… She doesn’t remember seeing this many women when she was here before. Okay, yes, no way to tell with Stormtroopers, and the only reason she knew Phasma was a woman was Finn told her, but…

“There are a _lot_ of women here.”

Jon smiles a little. “Yep.”

(She can feel he’s just enjoying the view, and hasn’t gotten what she means by that.) “Uh… I… don’t remember this many ladies being part of the Order.”

Jon blinks. “Oh… Yeah, right. Uh… I think, official recruiting numbers are thirty-five percent women and sixty-five percent men, and unfortunately dropping. We get a lot of ladies, but more men, and we’re not sure why. On some planets those numbers reverse, especially slave planets, and there are a lot of species where that’s true, too, but for free recruiting of humans we get more men. Snoke’s men took babies at will, so our numbers used to be closer to 55-45…”

He can see Rey’s curious about why the imbalance was still there.

Jon sighs. “Uh… no allowances were made for physical differences, so fewer women made it through the physical training.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

She’s looking around. “It’s a lot.”

That’s when Jon realizes what she’s seeing. “Oh… Yeah. Uh… not all of them are officers. Spouses, friends, children. Rank hath its privileges, and if you’re an officer you’re likely to get off board and may end up bringing someone back with you. Officer families also have this use of this deck. Enlisted people can marry, but they don’t have private rooms, so it’s less… everything… about being married.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Jon doesn’t get what she means.

“You’re in a ship built for 25 million, you’ve got less than a quarter of that, why don’t enlisted people have their own rooms?”

Jon blinks. “I’ll add it to the to-do list.”   

 

 

* * *

After munching, and walking around a bit to look at different shops and styles of clothing, Rey does wander into a few places to buy things.

As Jon’s paying for a pair of decidedly less than practical boots, knee-high ones in a very soft, light gray suede, the sort of boot that would be a mess in about twenty steps if they had to go anywhere with anything like dirt, or worse, shin-deep snow, the merchant, who apparently knows him, says, voice low and conspiratorial, when he thinks Rey’s not paying attention, “You scouting the other side of the ship?”

But she is paying attention, so she sees the annoyed roll of Jon’s eyes. “Just pack them up nicely.”

“Yes, sir.”

As they’re walking out, she gives him a questioning look, and he shakes his head. “Anyone who’s been here long enough knows that I used to be married, to a man.” He touches the box with the boots in it. “Lane liked a good pair of boots, too. I’d get them for him as presents.”

“Oh. I’m… sorry?”

He shrugs a little. “They’re good memories.”

“I take it you’d still be married if you could.”

“I would, but I can’t, so, that’s that.” He looks to the next shop. It’s got a variety of women’s clothing. “Anything of interest?”

“Let’s see.” Rey knows to drop the topic, so she does.

 

 

* * *

After two hours, Rey’s got a collection of comfortable, functional, and as per Jon’s desires, expensive, clothing.

And Jon’s got an idea of what Rey _likes._ He’s made sure to photograph everything she’s bought, preferably with her wearing it, (including one of the sarees, which live here, because Ren’s rooms have closet space, which is not a thing at their cottage, and seeing the sarees, he also noticed Ren’s white suit, and that gets some _ideas_ for the wedding he’s not supposed to be designing a _dress_ for. Nope, not a dress. But a fucking _suit?_ Oh yeah! Ren said exactly nothing about that, and when the time comes, that man is going to make people’s eyes bleed he’s going to be so well-dressed.) so that when he goes to visit his mum, he’s got everything she could want for working on good sketches for Rey.

And after two hours, Rey also has more of an idea of what she _likes._ It’s sort of similar to food. So long went by without her ever having to factor in any level of preference into what she wore that she never developed a habit of taking her preferences into account. And this afternoon, all she had to do was try things on and work on developing preferences.

Jon was right, when off-duty, the people, ladies, of the Order wear more or less whatever they like, and that’s a wide array of clothing. Unlike Naboo or Gidi Secundus, once their uniforms come off, there’s no unifying idea of what constitutes style among the officer class of the Order.

The Hux-method grads tended to move in more utilitarian fashions, wearing outfits that looked a lot like their uniforms. The Palpatine officers, and, as Jon identified when she asked, the wives, friends, and older daughters of officers, wear everything from very structured, very formal suits, to light, flowy dresses, to soft, comfy, slouchy outfits of knit and jersey.

The near uniforms and suits held no interest for Rey. Long flowy dresses she certainly looked at, and touched, but had a difficult time imagining wearing them. Jon noticed that, and has a sense that that’s something she may like, but doesn’t feel like she belongs in. And having gotten that sense, he’s decided his personal mission is to make sure she feels like she _belongs_ in the longest, flowiest dress made of the finest silk he can get his hands on. (He doubles down on that mental promise when she shows him the sarees and her eyes light up as she touches the silk.)

She bought trousers and leggings. A few snug and tailored, but not tight dresses, some with sleeves, some without, that fall to mid-thigh, to wear over the leggings. The boots. Two sets of shoes. Several soft and flowy shirts and sweaters to go with the trousers. A few vests. Her color pallet is what Jon would call eclectic, but none of them look bad on her, so he’s not going to tell her not to put a long rosy-peach knit dress with cool gray-green leggings, a gray blue vest, and gray boots.

They’ve just about finished up with the clothing, when she says, “The women wear cosmetics, don’t they?”

He glances around. When they’re in uniform, they generally don’t, but in their off-hours wear, they do. He nods. “Looks like it, but I’m going to be near useless for that. Beyond a little eyelash darkening, which you don’t need, I don’t wear them myself.”

“Okay.”

 

* * *

Kylo’s not sure what he expected was going to happen when Jon and Rey got together for this. Probably sort of what happened when Jon made him his clothing. He took measurements asked about colors, and then clothing appeared.

He and Rey returning with bags, and boxes, and _stuff_ would appear to indicate this isn’t working the way he was expecting.

They wander off, chatting amiably, back into his room, and of course, _now_ he’s got the fucking soundproofing of the gods in there, so he can hear exactly _nothing_ of what’s going on, though Rey appears to be enjoying it.

She’s nervous, though, too. A little undercurrent of it.

_Okay?_

_Enough, it’ll hold for tonight._

_That’s ominous._

_Nah. Don’t want to be dwelling on it now._

_Okay._

 

 

* * *

Jon’s got pictures. He’s got measurements. He’s got three days of “leave.” (Meaning he’ll be running everything from his comm and data pads.) He knows what sorts of colors Rey likes. He’s _ready._

“So, I’ll see you in a few days. My mom and I’ll make up some sketches. You decide what you like. I’ll get the base shape put together, and she’ll come here for the final cut and finish.”

“This sounds like a lot of effort,” Rey says.

He smirks. She’s got no idea. Mirina Frakes hasn’t left Coruscant in… Thirty-five years probably. People come to her. No one’s had the clout to get her off world since the fall of the Empire, and honestly, for anyone short of the Emperor’s Mistress, she didn’t move.

But for the Master’s bride? For her son’s career… Well, a day or two away from her shop can be arranged.

“For you, it’ll happen. I’ll make sure she brings one of my sisters, too. You want someone who knows something about cosmetics, and they do.”

Rey looks a little off balance.

“It’s a lot, isn’t it?”

She nods. “Yeah.”

“Do you mind if I ask… I mean…” He’s biting his lip. “How do you… not know any of this?”

“Born and raised on Jakku.”

“Oh.” And that tells him almost all he needs to know, but starts another mystery. “Wait, how do you know him, then?”

Rey feels nervous about that. “Takodana. We met on Takodana. He… noticed that… I’m… Force sensitive, too. And… uh… eventually, I sort of… helped with the coup against Snoke.”

Jon blinks, remembering something Kylo said that he hadn’t really _heard._ “You killed half the Praetorians, and… his face…”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Intentionally?”

“Yes. You don’t accidentally kill half of Snoke’s guards.”

“No… His face… I mean, you didn’t accidentally hit him, right?”

“Uh. No. That was intentional, too.”

Jon’s just staring at her. He’s rubbing his lips together, and finally says, “So, he’s uh… not kidding about getting some real armor for you, then, is he?”

She shakes her head. “He’s really not.”

“Okay. I’ll give you the same answer I gave him on that one. I want to see you fight before designing that.”

“Oh… Sure. My staff is at home, but…”

Jon holds up his hands. He’s not just at his limit, he’s a bit beyond it. “Not today. I’ve enjoyed this, but I’ve pushed the rest of my duties to the side, and need to get back to them.”

“Of course.”

 

 

* * *

“Go well?” Ren asks when Jon comes out.

“I think so. She’s got out and about around here clothing, and didn’t run away from me this time, so… Probably.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Jon’s looking Ren up and down, trying to imagine him at home. “She… invited me to your place for dinner when I have a free evening.”

Ren blinks at that. “Oh.”

“Is that… okay?”

“Uh. Yes. Sure. Just…” Ren isn’t exactly panicking, but he does look a bit unsettled.

“Just…” Jon leads. Normally, he’d drop it, but if he’s going to work on not fearing Ren, he’ll work on it.

“Home is… different.”

“How so?” Jon asks, genuinely curious.

Ren glances around his office. “Every inch of it isn’t black, among other things.”

Jon smiles at that. “I’ll let you know. Probably not until after the First Year Celebrations.”

“Okay.”

 

 

* * *

“Well…” Kylo says as he heads in to see Rey. “Looks like you had fun.”

“Maybe. I didn’t hate it.”

“That’s something.” He stares at her, willing her to talk. “I can feel something else is up.”

Rey opens her mouth, and feels really bizarre saying this, but… “Jon’s husband was killed by the Resistance.”

Kylo nods. He’s aware of that.

She spends another moment just looking at him, but he’s not getting it.

And that’s when it finally, really, sinks in for both of them how deeply Leia and Han and Luke shaped Ben-who-would-eventually-be-Kylo. Kylo ran away. He joined Snoke. He fought with the First Order. He, never, ever internalized the idea that he and they weren’t the bad guys, or that they didn’t deserve anything that came their way.

Not really. He can talk about it. He can use it defensively. But, it’s this moment, right here, right now, when it’s just starting to occur to him, that possibly Jon might have some issues with getting to know everyone who’s left in the Resistance. And, maybe, like Finn and Rose, he might not be _enthusiastic_ about his Master sleeping with the enemy.

Because, maybe, possibly Jon didn’t join the First Order thinking of it as Evil Incorporated. And, just possibly, Jon doesn’t think he painted a target on his own back, begging everyone in the galaxy to kick him as hard and often as possible because of it.

“Oh.” It’s one syllable, and it falls from his lips, as all of that starts to fall into place.

“Yeah. I told him we met on Takodana, you noticed I was Force sensitive, and I eventually helped you with Snoke’s coup, and… uh… cut your face in half, intentionally, along the way.”

“He already knew that part from me, but… Shit.”

She waits a beat before saying, “What do you want to do?”

“You mind giving us… an hour or so?”

“Now, you’re going to tell him, now?”

“I think I can get him before he leaves.” He offers her a half-smile. “I’d rather take the pain fast, than spend time dreading it later.”

 

 

* * *

To say that Jon is startled when the chime on the door of his personal chambers rings, and he finds Ren standing there, waiting for him, is to miss the point of this.

Startled does not even begin to explain the magnitude of the sensation going through his mind right now.

Gobsmacked, if he’d ever heard a word along those lines, would probably get the idea across, but it’s not a phrase he’s ever heard, so…

“Kylo… I…” he leaps out of his doorway, inviting him in. “I… didn’t know you even knew where my rooms were. Do you need something, or…”

 

 

For a moment, Ren’s just looking around. As a Lt. Colonel, Jon has his own suite. A combination of a bedroom, refresher, sitting room/kitchenette, and office. The colors are cool, blues and grays and tans, with a few deep greens to break the muted colors. To Ren’s left, there’s a collection of chairs and sofas, a coffee table, arranged for gathering with friends, in the middle of the table is a sphere with four fish in bright orange and coral colors, flitting around. Throughout the suite there are planters with some sort of dark green grass in them.

It’s very warm and bright and… It looks like… well, an actual _living_ space designed by someone with taste, style, and the sort of life where he/they do something other than just collapse into an exhausted heap at the end of the day. Other than the fact that it’s the same basic shape as Kylo’s room, it couldn’t be more different.

Jon sees Ren find what he’s looking for a second into looking around Jon’s room. Pictures, on the wall, of Jon and another man. He’s taller than Jon, with dark-caramel colored skin and black hair. There’s one shot, with both of them in their formal uniforms, holding hands, looking at each other, their wedding picture. The other shots are less formal. The two of them together, goofing around, or playing. There’s one with the two of them on a beach somewhere, lounging about, comfortable and relaxed with each other.

“Your husband?” Ren asks.

“Yes, that’s Lane. Kylo… My ship’s ready, and if I’m going to get anything done…”

Ren swallows. “Uh… I want you to know that this is something that just, never, occurred to me. I… I was raised by Leia Organa and Luke Skywalker, and… And… Shit… Even as a member of it… There was always the idea that the First Order was _wrong._ That we were the _bad guys_. The enemy. And… The idea that everyone else here doesn’t feel that way, it’s… Only just occurring to me, now, and…”

Jon’s staring at Ren, feeling like something very, very bizarre and frightening is about to happen.

“And Rey realized, talking to you, that… You might not have felt that way, and… Uh… point of view matters, and…”

And Ren’s doing that thing where he chews on his lip, and clenches his jaw, and rubs his index fingers against his thumb and… nervous and scared and unhappy is just pouring off the man right now. And Jon’s never really contemplated it, but, it’s likely that Ren’s Force is why when he’s feeling nervous and off, everyone around him feels nervous and off, too. “Okay, you’re starting to scare me, Kylo.”

Ren takes a deep breath and says, fast, “I met Rey because she’d befriended a droid that had a map the Resistance needed, and Snoke wanted. I was trying to get the droid from her, but she’d seen the map, too, so I decided to take her instead. I could read her mind, and I never had that kind of skill with a droid. And… Uh… That didn’t work exactly the way I was expecting it to. Or the way she was expecting it to. When we killed Snoke, she was actively trying to get me back to the Resistance, to the Jedi, Luke and my mom, and I was trying to get her to my side, and…”

Jon blinks. “Oh.” He blinks again. Rey was Resistance… He feels a little flash of… something… he’s not sure what, exactly, at that. Then he thinks about where they are, and who he’s talking to, so… “Uh… But… I mean, you won, right? She joined our side.”

Ren half-winces. “To an extent. And… she did, too. We’re balancing. Moving away from The First Order and the Resistance. Burned it all down and started over, but… She wasn’t part of Holdo’s attack.” He winces again. “She was here, with me, killing Snoke then. She was part of the attack that blew up Starkiller.” He gestures to his face. “That’s when _this_ happened.”

Jon blinks slowly.

“And… uh… It’s just, now, and I’m sorry about this, occurring to me, that this might be a problem for you, and… Shit. I just… Didn’t know. And… I’m sorry.”

Jon just stares at him for a moment, mind whirling, and then he sits down on his sofa, wishing he had had the sense to pour himself a drink before Ren got into this, and says, “It’s _just_ occurring to you, now, that people on this side might not be under the impression that they’re… what… evil? And deserve everything coming their way?”

Ren winces at that, too, sheepishly sits in the chair next to the sofa, looking very uncomfortable. “Yes.”

 

 

Jon rubs his lips together slowly. Then he rubs his eyes and temples like he has a headache, because one is forming _fast._ He nods once, and then looks up at Ren, and say, “How badly did your parents fuck you up, Kylo? Evil? We’re all evil? Every single one of us, including you, because… What? We didn’t agree on our politics? Because some of us thought that Snoke was doing the right thing? Because some of us didn’t think he was doing the right thing, but thought he was _better_ than the alternative? Have you ever _talked_ to anyone who volunteered to be here?”

He nods. “A few. Phasma… Hux…” That nod turns into a shake. “No. Not really, no. I brought my Knights here, and I watched him torture and kill them, and… He was evil, Jon. Whatever else was true, _he_ was evil.” Ren’s looking him in the eye, too, and there’s so much pain and heat pouring out of his gaze as he says that.

Jon doesn’t shrug, but it’s clear this is something he’s never dwelled on. “He may have been. I don’t know. I never saw him. But if he was evil, his reign stabilized a lot of the galaxy that was spinning out of control. Your mother ran _the Resistance_ , not the Army of the Republic. She couldn’t get enough members of the Senate _she built_ to go along with declaring war on Snoke, let alone building an army to defend against him, and that should have told you everything you ever needed to know about that situation.”

“We kidnapped babies.”

Jon looks nonplussed. “Sure. Most of the galaxy uses conscript labor. If you don’t like that… Well, obviously you didn’t. So, you put a stop to it. Hell, the Old Republic bred clones to keep itself in troops. You want to tell me how that’s any different that kidnapping babies?”

Ren blinks. Everything he ever heard about the Old Republic painted it like Alderaan, a tragically gone era they were working hard to get back. So, yes, he knew about the Clones, but he never really _knew_ about them.

“Exactly. It’s just politics, Kylo. Yeah, not all of it is nice. Yes, I prefer what you’re doing to what Snoke was doing, but… Being on a different side in a war doesn’t mean you get to decide that everyone on that side is beyond basic human compassion and feelings!”

“He blew up the Hosnian system!”

“Exactly! You know that’s wrong because you know being on the other side isn’t carte blanche to kill everyone. That’s why you don’t do shit like that. Because the other side is _people._ Gods, Kylo… We’re fucking people!”

“I…” it sounds lame, “know. Now.”

“Shit.” Jon rubs his forehead again. “And so was the Resistance, right?”

“Yeah.”

Jon sighs through his teeth, and asks again, “She wasn’t part of the attack on the _Supremacy?_ ”

“No. I’ve been told Holdo was on the ship by herself when she turned it on the _Supremacy._ ”

Jon nods. “You got a bunch of other Resistance buddies lurking about?”

“No. They… uh… just found out about me, and… Aren’t exactly fond of me, either. I’m… on speaking terms with Poe Dameron, but… that’s about it.”

Jon shakes his head. “I don’t know who that is.”

“He’d be appalled. Uh… Probably the thing you’d most need to know about him is he’s the guy who commanded the mutiny against Holdo.”

“I’m liking him better by the second.” Jon sighs. Then he looks at his bag, and his sketch pad, and his datapad.

“If you don’t want to do it… If you want out… You’re vested, and I’ll set you up for whatever retirement you might like.”

Jon rolls his eyes, scoots a little closer to Ren, and gives him a little shove on the shoulder. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

Ren blinks in surprise. Jon gets up, and Ren follows.

“I’m late. I’ve got to get going. I’ll see you in a few days. When I get back, and this quiets down, at some point we’re going to have a chat about how disagreeing about politics does not automatically make you evil.”

“Okay. Yes. I’d… like that.”

“Good.” He doesn’t exactly push Ren out of his room, but he does eye the door, and his manner lets him know what’s up.

“I’m leaving. Jon,” Ren turns, and it’s fairly clear that if he’s ever done this before it was a _very_ long time ago, because he’s awfully skittish as he takes a half step closer, hugs Jon, quickly, and then pulls back, blushing, and says, “Thank you,” and then just about runs out of the room.

 

 

Jon sighs, spends a moment staring at his fish, rubbing his temples, and says, “Bonnie, Clive, Tom, Al, I think I’ve got my work cut out for me.”

 

 

* * *

Like any member of the First Order who didn’t test in the top twenty percent for hand-eye-foot coordination, reflex speed, and spatial processing, Jon Frakes was never trained as a pilot.

So, he has a ship, and he has a pilot, who is a bit miffed at them leaving late.

But, once they’re in transit, there’s not much for Jon to do.

That’s not true. There’s a _ton_ of things for him to do. He’s just… not doing them.

Ren’s comment about them deserving everything that came their way is deeply disturbing to him. On a lot of levels, and he can’t get them out of his head.

So, instead of sketching, or looking through potential diplomats or any of the million other things he could be doing, he opens his datapad and begins a letter.

 

_Kylo,_

It still feels really bizarre to do that, refer to him as Kylo, but… he can feel the hug, and the nervous, scared, vulnerable emotions pouring off the man, and… Shit, this is a guy who has no friends, who’s been desperately trying to befriend Jon since… probably about their third meeting. That’s why he asked about using first names, and… And a lot of who _Kylo_ is is suddenly falling into place for Jon.

This isn’t a man trying to be a ‘good boss.’ This is someone who’s probably desperately lonely and isolated, stuck in a job he doesn’t know how to do, _trying_ to make a decent human connection with him, and Jon just missed it.

Couldn’t see Kylo for Ren.

He takes another breath, and starts to write.

_You’ve asked me to talk about this, and… right now I have a lot of thoughts going through my mind._

_You’ve told me your mother was Leia Organa, and how the idea that my/our side ‘deserved’ whatever came its way… And… I’ll admit, that’s a hard pill, but…_

_Growing up, there were things that never got_ said _because, of course, the war was over, and we were all nice and happy New Republicans, and those Imperials were… well… unfortunate. Because, of course, that’s the mask you had to strap onto your face to keep your place. To stay… comfortable... or out of prison… or alive. (Did your mother ever talk about what happened to Imperials who didn’t ‘convert?’ Not the Stormtroopers and the like, but the actual people who supported the Empire? There were quite a lot of them, trillions across the galaxy, and if you weren’t like my mother, insanely talented at something, things got bad.)_

_But it was a mask. At least in my family._

_I grew up knowing that the Rebellion had been a bunch of fanatical terrorists who managed to overthrow a democratically elected government._

_And yes, Palpatine had gone… as my mother put it… but only in the privacy of our own home, “A touch problematic toward the end, but nothing that required taking down the entire Empire!” or “Well, of course dissolving the senate had been a mistake, but… Well,_ they _kept hiding their plots in there, and using their diplomatic credits to hide their spies. Didn’t have the votes to take him out, but that didn’t stop them from plotting. Some Republicans they were!”_

_Or, as my oldest sister put it, “The old bat went crazy and paranoid, and unfortunately, when an Emperor goes crazy, there’s only one way to get rid of him. If Vader had done his job the way he was supposed to, this would have never gotten that far.”_

_Anyway, there is a point to this rambling. Namely, this: There’s never been a government anywhere that wasn’t to the benefit of most of the people under it. Once that ceases to be true, someone takes it out. I suppose that’s what happened to the Empire. It stopped benefiting the right people, and they took them out._

_That’s all any of this has ever been, which group gets the most benefit. The Empire benefited Imperials. The Rebellion benefited Rebels. The Republic benefited Republicans. There’s always an in-group and an out-group. Those on the rise and those who are falling._

_And there has never, ever been some Force-ordained holy group of perfect people building a utopia that benefits_ everyone. _The Old Republic wasn’t one._ _Your mum didn’t build one. You’re not going to build one, either. It_ can’t _be done._

_You do as much as you can for as many as you can, and that’s that. If you’re lucky, more people benefit from your rule than don’t, and if that’s true, you get to keep ruling._

_Now, I like what you’re doing with the Order, making membership voluntary. As long as we continue with this, it more or less guarantees that the people who benefit from us will stick around, and the ones who don’t will just leave, go find something that suits them more. Sure, we’ll tangle with outsiders, but this should cut down on factions within._

_I think we’ll be stronger, and last longer, because of that, but in the end, even with that, it still boils down to this, we’re a collection of people, doing the best we can, for each other, for The Order, and we’ll hope that it’s good, and pray that we don’t fuck too many bystanders, but… It’s just a hope._

_One last thought, before I get back to ‘work.’ I don’t know what your parents taught you. Obviously, they believed strongly in what they were doing, but… As soon as you decide an entire political movement, especially one that will literally hold a blaster to your head and force you to join, from the foot soldiers to the leaders to everyone in between is_ evil _you’ve lost your basic humanity. If the entire Empire deserved what it got, if everyone in Snoke’s organization did… Then so did everyone in the Resistance or the Rebellion or… Alderaan… I guess. It’s the same thought process, just a different outgroup._

_That’s the story, right? I remember watching it on the holovids and newsreels in school. The Emperor dissolved the senate and destroyed perfect, peaceful Alderaan, and after that… Well, anything that happened to anyone in an Imperial uniform was warranted, right?_

_How is that different from the idea that the Queen and Prince Consort of Alderaan were part of the Rebellion, so blow the whole place up?_

_We’re better than that._

_Qualeen proved it. You got the people who didn’t screw you over out. You only went against the ones who hurt us or the ones who benefited from us getting hurt._

_And that’s it. That’s the best we can do._

_Okay, back to ‘work.’ See you in three days,_

_\--Jon_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On the off chance it's not glaringly apparent, I'm setting Jon up as LightOrder, and Poe as DarkMaji. 
> 
> After all, if we're really going to balance, one team can't have a monopoly on the Light or Dark.
> 
> And, for those of you who are rooting for "Joe," as of this point in time, Poe and Jon will meet in chapter two of Public/Private.


	55. Master Kylo

12/8/1

 

Kylo tidies his outfit. He hasn’t felt this… nervous probably isn’t the right word, but it’s in the neighborhood, in years. This interested in making a good impression. In not just having approval, but wanting them to want to give it to him.

That’s probably it.

He sees Rey watching, and says, “We’re not meditating.”

She laughs, remembering. “Perish the thought.”

He nods to her, and steps out of their cottage into the sunshine, walking, in his full blacks, with his lightsaber on his hip, cloak and cowl on, because it’s bloody cold, alone, through her town, for the first time.

 

 

* * *

 

It had occurred to him, oh, about ten hours after he got back to the _Supremacy_ after deciding that he could teach saber, that it’s not exactly like he’s got to _wait_ to get twenty-two training sabers. And yesterday, two very surprised looking Stormtroopers, in their new, non-armored uniforms, delivered two boxes full of small training sabers to him.

He’s got one for himself. The hilt is an exact match for his light saber. The blade isn’t, but it’s the right length, as light as possible, and heated. Hot enough to let you know you’ve been hit; it’ll raise a blister if it hits bare skin, but nothing that’ll do any permanent damage.

Getting 22 more of them in a variety of sizes from smaller than he probably should have (After all, who trains a five-year-old how to use a lightsaber? He does. That appears to be the correct answer.) to an adult-sized one-handed saber, took about five hours. The one-handed one is lighter than the blade he uses, lighter than the one Anakin built, but since the oldest of the lot is sixteen and has never done this before, a lighter blade to build up strength with makes sense.

So, now all he’s got to do is go off and be… useful.

To a group of children.

 

 

* * *

He’s about twenty meters out of their cottage, which is fifteen more than he thought he’d get when Rose marches up to him. Paige, in the snuggli on her chest, sees him and offers up a pleased gurgle.

He’s a centimeter from saying “Hello to you, too,” and petting the underside of her chin, but the wall of _determined_ pouring off of Rose stops him short. So, he thinks it instead, and Paige smiles at him.

Rose catches at least some of the interaction, and _determined_ shifts a bit, a layer of frustrated and irked on top of it. Kylo’s trying not to be amused by the fact that those emotions are as much aimed at her as him.

She’s looking up at him, eyes narrowed. The top of her head just about comes to the top of his sternum, so she’s looking up, a lot.

“Be worth our trust.”

He blinks, not expecting that, but he can certainly work with it.

“I intend to.”

“Don’t intend, just do it.”

He nods at her, and slowly extends his hand, looking to give Paige a little pet. She’s reaching out for him, so Rose, grudgingly, allows it.

He kneels, stroking Paige’s cheek, and she grabs for his nose. He smiles at her thinking, _Maybe Aunt Rey was right. Maybe I’ll get to be Uncle Kylo. Would you like that?_

She coos a little, squeezing his nose.

 

 

Rose is watching this in amazement. “You like babies?”

“I like this one.” He gently removes Paige’s hand from his nose and stands up. He strokes her face again, black-gloved finger gentle on chill-reddened cheeks.

Rose’s eyes narrow again, and he gets a sense off of her that of course he should like Paige, she’s the perfect baby, everyone should like Paige.

He blinks a little, rubs his lips together, nods, and then thinks to Paige, _You’re lucky to have her._

Rose doesn’t know what just happened, but she can feel it wasn’t bad, so she offers Kylo a curt nod, and heads toward the shed where they’re keeping the insulation field generators. Time to get the last few cottages dug out of the snow, and insulation generators installed.

 

 

* * *

Kylo heads to the chapel, where the kids are waiting for him. He pulls off the cowl and cloak, not needing them in here, and even if it was cool enough for them, he’d likely take them off just to make it easier to see what he’s doing.

Granted, _seeing_ isn’t likely to be an issue here.

They are definitely staring at him. _Really_ staring at him. All of them are deeply curious, and the ones who didn’t come from the _Supremacy_ are, at least a little, afraid. And he’s feeling a bit nervous, too. He… sort of… taught some level of lightsaber work when he was Master Ben. Luke did most of the teaching. Mostly he just sparred with his fellow trainees, made them use what they’d learned.

But for the youngest of the bunch, he did spend some time showing them how to hold the saber correctly, and how to swing it around, and how to position their feet.

Part of him wonders if he’s going to go into this just offering up standard Yoda-approved Jedi technique.

After all, that’s how he learned it.

He looks down at the floor beneath them. The swirl of light and dark.

It’s time to shed what he learned and show them something new and, hopefully better.

And… If he doesn’t start talking soon, the little, squirmy ones are going to start asking him questions.

“You’ve all heard Rey talk about the light and the dark. That they exist in all of us and balance each other out.”

He sees a lot of little heads bobbing up and down.

“But, do some of you ever get the feeling that when Rey talks about the dark, she’s talking about the sky before a thunderstorm, and when you feel the dark, you’re feeling that same sky, at night, from inside a cave, a thousand feet under the ground?”

Two heads bobbing up and down, Critt can really _feel_ what he’s saying and the other darkling, who isn’t Force sensitive, can imagine it. Kylo can feel enough of the other one to sense the same little seeds that made Hux so dangerous.

He doesn’t look away from the children, but he feels Finn enter the chapel, and eventually he wanders to the back, where Kylo can see him, leaning against the wall of the dome, watching.

Kylo nods. “Not everyone is as dark as everyone else. How dark you are is just a thing that happens. Rey leans more toward the light side.” He stares them all down, making at least a second of eye contact with each one. “I don’t.” Twenty-two kids jump at that. He amped his power, and he’s Kylo Fucking Ren in his full blacks standing before them, saber at his side. Half of them look certain he’s about to use his saber to slaughter them all.

“Hate, anger, envy, disgust, these are dark side feelings. Everyone has some of them. Some of us have more of them. Some of us have an easier time finding them, or a harder time shutting them off. Some people think these feelings make us evil.” He doesn’t look to Finn as he says that. “Some look at these feelings and tell us we’re broken or wrong. That we shouldn’t have these feelings, or that we need to pretend they’re not there.

“ _They’re wrong_.” He amps that, too, though he doesn’t use any voice compulsion on it. “These feelings are there for a reason. Content, happy people rarely do great things. They have no reason to, they’re content and happy.

“Hate, anger, envy, disgust, these give birth to rage.” He had set the chapel with a few props last night, and he pulls one of them. A rock hovers into the air in front of him. It’s a good sized one, probably weighs about 20 kilos. He wiggles his fingers at them. “The glove has some padding and heat protection, but it is a glove, not a gauntlet.” He takes a moment to call his dark, and he knows the Force sensitive children can feel him doing it. One more moment, it’s not as easy as it was when he was Master of the Knights of Ren, Snoke’s enforcer. There’s less rage in there, now, but it’s not, by a long shot, gone. Then he punches the rock, shattering it into a million pieces and sending them flying. “Rage gives us power and motivation. And with rage, we can do _anything._ ” Then he takes the glove off, showing that his fingers are scratched and reddened. “They’ll bruise, but aren’t broken. Rage, allowed to flow indiscriminately will hurt you just as easily as everyone else. If I hadn’t held my hand correctly, and channeled my rage properly, I’d have broken my fingers, hand, and wrist, probably arm, and maybe elbow, and the rock would have sat there, unmoved, while Master Finn laughed at me so hard he’d sprain his back.”

Finn does smirk at that, because fuck yes, he would have.

He looks at the children. “Any of you can hit a rock right now, and all you’ll do is hurt yourself. Rage has to be tamed, tempered, married to a cause, focused, and when you’ve done that… You can do anything.”

“But isn’t the dark side evil?” one of the little lightlings, a non-Force sensitive one, he thinks that one’s name is Opal, but he’s not sure, asks, staring at Finn. Kylo can feel that lines are already being drawn through the town, and he’s got the sense that trying to nip those sooner rather than later is a good plan.

“No more so than the light. The person wielding it, and how they wield it, that will earn it the mark of evil or not.”

“How can the light be evil?” the oldest of the group, Jacen, who’s, from what Kylo can tell, fairly well balanced in himself, asks. And Kylo realizes that Jacen’s asking this as a way to get Kylo to _keep_ talking about it, extend the lesson, make the point clearer.

He blinks his thanks and feels Jacen sense it. He nods. _I’ve got your back._

Kylo’s not expecting that, but he appreciates it.

“I trained as a Jedi. I _was_ a Jedi. Believe it or not, ten years ago, I was Master Ben, in my beige and brown robes, with a blue lightsaber. That came to an end the first time I was attacked. In my sleep. Because of a premonition. By _my uncle_ , a man so firmly grounded in the light that most people consider him to be a near-god. Would we consider attacking a young man in his sleep to be evil? I certainly did. He, at the time, didn’t. He was ‘protecting’ a version of the future.

“That moment not only didn’t work out well for anyone, but it also set much of what he’d been afraid of into motion.

“And that near-god, so deeply shamed by what he had done, ran away, cutting himself off from the Force, and allowed the First Order to grow in leaps and bounds for the next decade, slaughtering every would-be Jedi we could find. Would we consider that evil? The slaughter? Absolutely. Running away? Maybe.

“Fear is of the dark. Luke feared a future. He attacked me to prevent it. He didn’t attack fast enough to kill me, so he set that future into play. Fear makes men easy to manipulate. I was asleep, and someone I loved tried to kill me. My knights were the other members of the school who joined my side in the fight that ensued. When we left, we’d been _attacked_ and _betrayed_ by the Jedi. When we’d done nothing but protect ourselves. We were afraid, and Snoke hopped in to use that. Afraid, hurt, hate bubbling up, because everything we’d been taught for years was a lie, we were easy to convince that any other Force users were a threat. So we hunted them down and killed them.

“That was dark used for evil.

“Rey and I stood in front of Snoke. He was droning away about how I was going to kill her. How he owned me, and all I could feel was rage, and pain, and hate, and a tiny little spark of something that would eventually be love.

“I cut him in half, and Rey and I fought off the Praetorian Guard. Would any of you challenge the idea that that was dark, let alone dark used for good?” He’s looking directly at Finn as he says it, and Finn holds the gaze, not blinking.

“How about light used for evil? Go back further, beyond my personal timeline, the Jedi, with calmness and agape, love for everyone, sought out the dark and executed it, throwing the entire galaxy out of balance, resulting in almost a century of war and the deaths of trillions. Each and every person in that drama had their own part to play, made their own choices, decided issue by issue to be good or evil, but at the core was the idea that light is good and dark is evil, so let’s get rid of the dark.

“Some of you, like Rey, naturally bend toward the light, and there’s great value to that. Healing, counseling, strategy, building, all of those things flow naturally from the light, and all of them are vital.

“But some of us were made to destroy, and there’s a place for that, too.”

Kylo nods to Finn, who’s glaring at him, not liking Kylo’s version of dark and light and recent Skywalker history. “Master Finn is watching us. He’s fairly well balanced between his dark and light tendencies. He and I have a longer history than either of us would like, I’d say. And right now, he’s experiencing some very hot, very dark feelings. I’ve hurt him in the past, and his friends. I’ve killed some of them, one with my own hands, so he has every right to those feelings. They are _beyond_ warranted.”

Finn rolls his eyes, annoyed at the idea that Ren’s giving him _permission_ to be angry at him.

“The question is, what will he do with them?”

Kylo’s eyes meet Finn’s and the children all watch, even the non-Force sensitive ones can feel the tension crackling between them.

Finn keeps watching him, and then rubs his lips together, before saying, “I don’t know.”

“Fair enough.” Then he returns his attention to the children. “Light and dark will often find themselves in conflict, but they don’t have to be. Used well, and they’ll complement each other. Your dark feelings can tear down the old, and your light ones can build something new. Your dark feelings can be fostered, nurtured, to give you power when you need to protect that which you’ve cherished. But they have to be controlled, to prevent you from tearing everything down, including yourself.” He wiggles his fingers which are starting to purple from the force of his hit.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” Kven, one of the children he took off the _Supremacy_ asks.

“Yes.”

“Then why do it?”

“Mastery of anything worth mastering will cause you pain. Obtaining anything that matters will cause you pain. Pain is not to be feared, or avoided, it’s just pain. You can and will survive it, and if what that pain gets you matters, then you go through the pain.” He nods to them. “Now, up you get. Day one lesson one, how to hold a saber.”

 

 

* * *

The absolute last thing Finn wants to do is talk with Ren. He’d rather muck out the Favier’s stalls with his tongue.

But he’s feeling drawn to watch.

Ren’s got all twenty-two of them standing, balanced, holding appropriately-sized training blades, and making sure each one of them has a proper grasp.

“A lightsaber is a one-and-a-half-handed weapon. Meaning that most of the time, you’ll use it two handed, but if you want or need to, you can use it one-handed. If you can’t hold this, one-handed, comfortably, you need a lighter one.” He’s got them holding them out, one-handed. “Just hold it, right now. You’ve got little arms, and you need to build up strength.”

Whatever the children were expecting, this isn’t it.

And for that matter, that’s true of Finn, too.

“When you build you own, you’ll have practiced long enough to know what sort of grip works best for you. Until then, dominant hand—The one you use to eat with—on top.”

Rugh pipes up, “I use both!”

Finn sniggers at that.

“Which one holds the fork?” Ren asks, having come to the conclusion that everyone with two hands uses both of them to eat.

“What’s a fork?” She’s staring up at him, eyes bright, and he’s looking down at her, brows scrunched together.

The sniggering gets louder as Kylo Ren, Master of the Order, attempts to explain a fork to a child who’s only ever used chopsticks and a spoon, while six of the other twenty-one children around him start bonking each other with their practice sabers, hissing when they discover he wasn’t kidding about the blades being hot.

Ren’s glaring at Finn, because there’s what he’d like to do, which would likely result in twenty-two young people all wetting themselves in terror, and he’s fairly sure that constitutes overkill for this particular situation. And there’s what he needs to do, get them under control, but he’s not exactly coming up with any good ideas for that.

Finn’s smirking like this is the best thing he’s ever seen, because, at least right now, it is. It’s stupidly gratifying to see that Ren is not, in fact, good at _everything._

He startles a little when he hears, _Do better, if you can_ echo in his head.

He raises an eyebrow at Ren, challenge in his gaze, and then nods.

“’TENSHUN! UP STRAIGHT AND QUIET, ALL OF YOU!” Finn’s voice barks out in a perfect training-sergeant shout.

Ren blinks. He almost straightened up at that command, too.

Finn walks up to the children. “Straight lines, now. Eyes forward. Holding those sabers!” He looks down at Rugh. He takes the practice saber from her and says, “Hands down.”

She puts her hands down.

“Okay, quick, grab for it.” Then he drops the saber.

The first hand to reach is her right one. “That’s your dominant hand.”

Then she’s got the correct hold.

And Finn returns to the back, a very smug smirk on his face, to watch Ren teach them how to stand, holding the saber, and how to balance their weight on their feet, with... varying degrees of success. And how to do a few, basic, defensive moves. No one hit any of the other ones hard enough to cause a bruise, so… that’s probably a good lesson, and all of them are looking forward to the next one, and half of them are already planning their own sabers.

At the end of it, Ren comes over, eyeing Finn. “You weren’t an officer.”

“Nope. They said I would be, though.” He’s eyeing Ren back, just as hard. “You were never enlisted. Never had a sergeant barking orders at you.”

“Never a sergeant.” Finn’s almost on the verge of thinking about that comment, but he can feel Ren sorting through his head, and tries to stop it, but he’s got no talent for that. “You like the excitement of being on the _Falcon_. You miss your family when you’re there, and you think it’s too dangerous for them to be on there. That causes tension with Rose, because she disagrees. You’d like to be with them every day and night, but you want them safe, and you want the danger for yourself.”

Finn doesn’t nod, because what would be the point? Obviously, Ren knows he’s right.

“It’d be easier if you had some sense of purpose off the _Falcon._ You don’t think there’s anything to do here, though. Not that matters. You can lug rocks as well as anyone else can, but you’re better in the sky, helping Chewie make the deals that let you keep supplying us.”

“Us?” There’s not, in any universe Finn wants to be in, a situation where _us_ is an appropriate word to describe him and Ren.

“I’m here. You’re here. We’re both working toward a mutual goal of improving this settlement. A plural personal pronoun would be appropriate, hence _us._ ”

Finn rolls his eyes. “Are you always a flaming asshole?” 

Ren doesn’t respond to that. “Maintaining adequate supplies is not going to be an issue, soon. Being able to train more than a handful of children at a time will be.” Ren rubs the scar on his arm from where Finn got him. “You’re ranked in all of our basic combat skills.”

“And most of the advanced. I can use any hand to hand weapon the First Order had.”

Ren nods. “Baton, too.”

“Of course.”

“They’re not that different from a saber.”

“I know.” His voice is pointed, after all, hours of baton training is how he managed to put that mark on Ren.

Ren just looks at him. “I’ll do better one on one, or with small groups. Jacen’s big enough that I can really train him with a saber, Critt, Magiit, Savarah, and Elias will be in a year. There are two of them I need to spend more time with, working on not letting their dark eat them. For the rest of them, I’ll be more use to them once they have the basics.”

“Are you asking me something?” Finn says, voice dry.

“I’m assessing the situation, pointing out what we both know is true. What you do about that is up to you.”

Finn’s eyes narrow. “Would it _kill_ you to ask me to help?”

There’s a tiny flicker of something that could possibly be humor in Ren’s eyes. “No, but like not being a flaming asshole, I imagine it’d make both of us uncomfortable.”

Finn decides Ren’s likely right about that. “Chewie’d miss me.”

“Probably, but Poe has a skill set of greater value to him. And since we won’t be needing someone to run the galaxy looking for cut rate supplies that can be talked out of the hands of whomever owns them, perhaps the two of them can turn their skills to scouting for people we can benefit?”

Finn’s eyes narrow, he decides to give Ren a centimeter. “Perhaps.”

The conversation doesn’t feel done, but neither of them have anything to add for a moment.

Then Ren comes up with, “Did you want to be an officer?”

“I did, until I watched one cut down an unarmed man and order the massacre of everyone in a town.”

Ren doesn’t physically shrug that off, but it’s clear he’s just letting it float by him. “Then don’t do that, Commander Finn.”

Finn doesn’t hit him, but it’s close. He feels his fist clench, and his arm start to swing but he forces it to stay at his side. And he knows Ren caught it, because he’s already a step back, hand on his saber. Finn pulls himself out of his fight, and holds his hands up, visibly, intentionally moving himself out of fight mode. Ren moves his hand away from his saber, taking another step back.

 

 

Both of them eye each other, waiting for a moment, seeing if the tension will break, badly. But it doesn’t. Once it’s clear they’re both in detente mode, Finn speaks again, “Okay, let’s get a few things clear. You do not run Lirium. The fancy fucking title you’ve got on the _Supremacy_ is worth fuck all here. Here, at best, you’re just like any other adult. And _best_ is going to require a fucking kiloton of toeing the line, because you already give me nightmares and any hint you might do something that puts my family in danger is going to result in a lot of pain, for you.”

Ren’s beyond dubious of that statement, and it shows on his face.

Finn glares at him, for a heartbeat before saying, “Yeah, I know, you can stop me dead if you know I’m coming, but,” and Finn smiles, and it’s the gesture of a predator protecting his cubs, of a killer pulling a knife he intends to enjoy using, “after all, like you said, even you sleep.”

For a second, Ren’s quiet, and Finn’s got the sense he’s thinking of… bloody things, and making himself not say them. Then he’s not thinking about that, intentionally not. He’s… trying to calm them down. He comes up with, “With Rey,” as a way to defuse things.

Finn’s eyes are hot, and steady. “If you thought I was a threat to your family, Rose wouldn’t stop you for a second, would she?”

Ren half-inclines his head. Finn gets the sense that he’s thinking about it. That he wouldn’t… intentionally… hit Rose, if she were between him and a threat for a family. He’d certainly _try_ to avoid her, but if she couldn’t be avoided… “For a second.”

“And I’d _try_ not to hit Rey.”

Ren nods. “So we understand each other.”

“Good. Second of all, even if you did run Lirium, which you do _not,_ you’d have fuck all say over _anything_ involving me and my family. Whatever the hell chain of command you think you’re part of, I’m not in it. You can’t promote me, demote me, order me around, or anything else, because I’m not, now or ever, yours.”

Ren holds his hands up in a peace gesture. “Noted. That doesn’t make this any less true though. They still need to learn the kind of things you know, and you appear to be better at teaching, or at least maintaining class control, than I am, so you might as well teach. Be Master Tico if you like. Or Finn. Or Lord of the Baton. Or whatever term you desire.”

Finn doesn’t glare at him, but there is a grudging acceptance that Ren might be right.

“I’ll think on it.”

“Good.”

 

* * *

Kylo can feel Rey in the back of his head as he’s moving away from Finn. He knows she’s continuing to work her way through the town, applying more and better insulation to the cottages. A job that’s getting a lot slower because they’ve got to dig each cottage out from under the snow before they start.

 _Getting sorted?_ she thinks to him, aware that he and Finn are still feeling each other out.

_Maybe? I find the posturing boring._

_I’m sure you do. What’s up next?_

_Back to the ship. You going to come with me?_

_Probably not. Our place is next. Wanna help?_

For a moment, the idea of getting to do something, hard, physical, and _useful_ just sings through him. _Yes, but I can’t. Legal’s got the ‘colony contracts’ written up. Supposedly finished. I get to read them, decide if I like them, and mark them up. Then meetings until my eyes bleed._

He sends her the sense of his kiss as he takes a moment to center himself, and shift to the _Supremacy._ He steps over, unwinding the cowl, draping it over his chair, picking up the stack of new datapads on his desk. He’s staring at them, wondering how it’s even possible for them to multiply this fast, when he feels her kiss back.

 

 

* * *

He finishes his cup of coffee, rubbing his eyes, looking at the pad. This is the third time he’s sent the proto-contract back, and… with any luck, this one is _finally_ what he’s looking for. With any luck it’s also somewhere in the neighborhood of what the different colonies think they agreed to, but… That’s for what happens after _their_ legal departments get done with them.

“More coffee?” C8 asks.

Kylo blinks, noticing the droid hovering over his shoulder. “No.” Looking at the empty cup does give him an idea, though. “Can you get an extra bag of the beans for me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thanks.” 

C8 pauses, just at the edge of Kylo’s peripheral vision. “You’re not intending to start eating them straight, are you?”

That gets him to look up. And then look at the cup next to him… How many of them has he had? Three? Six? Shit, he’s got to pay more attention to this. He’s got the sense that he drains a cup, and C8 just pops up and pours him more. “No. I was… going to give it to someone.”

“Oh. Yes. Would you like it wrapped?”

Kylo blinks. “Wrapped?”

“It’s traditional to encase presents in a nice package.”

“It’s…” He’s about to say it’s not a present, but, he guesses it sort of is, so. “No. Just, one of the bags I take home.”

“Yes, sir. Anything else?”

“No.” And he gets reading the contract.

An hour later, he’s leaning back in his chair, holding the data pad, feeling… Content, he guesses. He likes this one. It’s a ten year ‘Gradual Emancipation’ contract. The Colony in question will, for the first four years, give them 90% of their output in exchange for protection, tools, machinery, and, as needed technical specialists. Years five through ten, that percentage will drop, but the amount of protection, tools, machinery, and technical specialists will drop, too, as the Colony takes over more and more of its own management. By year eleven, the Order will have completely detangled itself financially from the colony, and it will be officially independent.

People though, that’s a different story. In perpetuity, as many recruiting stations as they wish to put on the planet will always be welcome, and, any member of the Order who wishes to settle there will always be welcome. Likewise, if at any point the population on the planet becomes more than 2/3rds Order citizens, should they desire a referendum to formally join the planet to the Order, it will be held.

It’s slower than gunships and battles, but he’s got the sense that when The Order “conquers” a planet, it’s going to stay “conquered.”

 

 

* * *

The green sun is still in the sky when Kylo gets back to Lirium. Low in the sky, but that’s normal for his usual getting home time. He places dinner on the table, notices that Rey’s not there yet… Finishing up something in the group kitchen with the kids, which is fine with him, because he’s got one more job for today.

He takes a moment to get a feel for where Poe is, in his ship, and then sets himself near the hatch. It’s down, but Kylo’s not sure what the decorum is for this. No door to knock on, so…

“Hello.”

A few moments later, Poe comes to the top of the hatch, and waves Kylo up. “You in the wrong place?” he asks when Kylo comes up.

“I’d say that’s unlikely.” He holds out the bag of coffee.

Poe stares at it. “Are you… attempting to be neighborly?”

“Maybe.” He shrugs a little. That’s probably part of this. Another part is making sure the pilot doesn’t show up at the crack of dawn and cut into his morning cuddle with Rey time again. “Or maybe, pretty as you are, you’re not the first face I want to see in the morning.”

Poe laughs, and takes the coffee, leading them to a small table and benches. “Not looking to _rise_ and shine for me," he says as he sits down and motions for Kylo to join him. 

“Not for _you_ ,” Kylo says with a bit of a smirk, as he settles in.

As soon as he’s said it, he can feel Poe thinking, _Oh yeah, no Leia in there, at all._ “I’ll bet.” Poe looks at the coffee. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. That said… dinnertime visits are fine. Getting extra food isn’t a problem as long as I know a few hours ahead of time.”

 

 

“I’ll keep that in mind.”  Poe’s quiet for a moment. “You know, you could at least attempt something like this with Finn.” Unspoken but understood is Poe’s _He’s a really good guy and you’d be lucky to have him as a friend._

Kylo shakes his head. “No. He wouldn’t welcome it.”

“Or you can’t make yourself do it?”

Kylo looks at the ceiling and shakes his head as he says, “If I say, both, will you leave it be?”

“If you say both, will you think about why you can’t do it?” Poe asks, but it’s more of a command than a question.

“He finds the idea of me being an actual person deeply disconcerting if not outright painful, and I’m done trying to get people who don’t like me to change their minds about it.”

Poe looks at the coffee in his hand, then back up to Kylo. His voice is painfully dry as he says, “Really?”

Kylo rolls his eyes. “I’m done trying to make people who think I’m going to murder their families in their sleep for giggles stop seeing the monster. Is that specific enough? When he decides me just breathing isn’t a threat, I’ll start trying.”

“Fair enough.”

 

 

* * *

Stepping back into their home, Kylo notices that Rey is home, and… There are things, good smelling things, good smelling things he did not bring here, on their kitchen table.

She’s in their bedroom, and he’s also realizing that… Yes… It’s _warm_ in here.

Rey comes out a moment later, in just a pair of trousers, and one of the sweaters she got on the _Supremacy._

“Like it?” she says, meaning the sweater, but, right now he’s awfully pleased with a whole array of things, not the least of which is being able to take off his cloak and cowl and tunic and boots when he’s indoors again.

“Yes.” He heads to their bedroom to hang his extra clothing up. A moment later, he’s back, looking at the things on the table, next to the roasted mushroom pasta he put there. “Did you… bake?”

She grins at him. “Poe’s muffins were good, and his comment about cookbooks got me thinking, so…” She gently touches the things. “Cookies!”

Kylo nods, reaching a hand out. These are very obviously cookies made by someone who’s never seen one before, but they smell good, so he’s got no need to harp on the point.

He’s almost to one of them when she gently whacks the back of his hand. He looks up at her confused.

“Later,” she says.

“Later? What am I, eight again? Adults get to eat dessert whenever they like, in their own home.”

She laughs at that. “Fine. One.”

He rolls his eyes at _one,_ and reaches for it, and bites into it, enjoying the flavor. Okay, it’s the wrong shape, whoever heard of flat, round cookies? But the flavor is right, buttery, sweet, crispy. “This is good.”

“Thank you.” She sits down and begins to put the pasta on plates for them. He heads to the sink to pour them water.

“So, why aren’t we having cookies for dinner?” he asks as he puts the glasses down and sits next to her.

“Because we’re having cookies for dessert, along with guests.”

He blinks. “Okay. Who’s coming over?”

“Critt and Ostrae.”

“The darklings,” he says, twirling his fork in the pasta, spearing a mushroom.

“Yeah. Ostrae’s kind of shy, but she’s got a sweet tooth, so…”

Kylo looks at her, shaking his head. “Welcome to the dark side, we have cookies?”

“If it works…”

He sighs. “Why not… Certainly better than how I learned it.”

 

 

* * *

If he wasn’t sure about the emotional sensation he was experiencing this morning, he’s sure about it now. This is nervous.

Yep. No mistaking this for anything else. It’s nervous.

He supposes the only good thing about this is that the kids are kind of nervous, too. They’re all sitting around the kitchen table, and the cookies, just sort of looking at each other.

Critt and Ostrae.

Ostrae’s the youngest of three, and she’s the only non-Force sensitive of the bunch. He can feel the resentment coming off of her. Her older brother and sister can do… all of it. He thinks that it’s possible Poe might be a better mentor for her. Someone who can show her that it’s okay to not be able to float rocks or whatever. Him standing… sitting actually, they’re all around the kitchen table, eating the cookies… there being the embodiment of dark _Force_ isn’t doing much for her.

But… she’s seven, and he can remember being a seven-year-old who felt like he didn’t fit in with anyone, and he certainly remembers being not all that much older, and being the odd one out at Luke’s school.

Still, seven. He’s not exactly widely experienced with little kids, let alone dark ones.

He’s fairly sure he’ll have an easier time with Critt. He’s a fourteenish-year-old boy whose parents disapprove of him with every cell of their being and ran off rather than deal with him in person. Kylo’s sung that song before.  

Rey’s in the bedroom, reading, giving them ‘alone time.’

Kylo’s got bugger all idea what to do with it, so he takes a cookie, and eats it.

Finally Critt says, “How’s your hand?”

He’s not wearing his gloves, so it’s clear that the bruises are there. “I’ve had worse.” Both of them look at the scar across his face. “Rey’ll probably fix them later.”

“You can’t?” Ostrae asks. From her point of view, Force sensitives can do _anything._

“Too dark.” He wiggles his fingers. “Can’t heal to save my or anyone else’s life. I can take less damage than a normal person, but I can’t fix it after I’ve taken it.”

“What else can’t you do?” Critt asks.

Kylo half-shrugs. “I’m probably not the guy you want to call if you need someone to calm things down. Keeping my temper in check isn’t easy. I’m generally not great at feeling like I belong in places. That’s getting better, though, temper is, too. I was never good with plants or animals.”

“The Faviers don’t like me,” Critt says.

“That’s because you keep coming up from their blind spot and clump around like a blatterfluth.”

Kylo doesn’t know what a blatterfluth is, but he’s going to guess it’s not known for easy grace. Granted, neither are fourteenish-year-old boys. “You’ll probably grow out of that.”

Critt rolls his eyes. But he does take a cookie and eat it. “Drinks?”

“Sure.” Kylo gets up. “Water or milk?” The he remembers something from being young. “My dad showed me this.” He gets the milk and pours three cups. Then he sets them down, and sits across from the kids. He takes a cookie. “Dip it in the milk. Then eat it.”

The kids don’t seem to be sure about it, but they try it.

“See, it’s good,” Kylo says as he sees and feels them enjoy it.

Critt looks at the cookie, and Kylo, and the milk, and he shakes his head, halfway between tears and laughing. “My parents would throw up if they saw this. Milk and cookies with the Jedi Killer.”

Ostrae’s eyes go wide. “Jedi Killer?” Apparently she hadn’t exactly understood all the nuances of Kylo’s earlier lesson.

Kylo doesn’t roll his eyes. “Like I said earlier, rage used indiscriminately can hurt you, and a lot of other people. Back in the day, I hurt _a lot_ of people.” He takes another bite of his own cookie. “As I was taught, when I was a Jedi, by my uncle, Luke Skywalker, fear, anger, pain, jealousy, aggression, wanting, attachment, they all lead to the dark side. And the dark side is, according to him, bad.” This time Kylo rolls his eyes. “He was wrong about the dark side is bad part. He was right that all of those things can lead you to do things you wish you hadn’t.”

Both of them are staring at him.

“You feel angry, and there’s just so… much of it. Like you can’t breathe or think… Just always _angry._ ”

Critt’s nodding along, then says, “Or sad.” Ostrae looks like she understands, and Kylo knows all about that.

“And if there’s nothing good to do with it, you do something bad, just… so you don’t feel that way anymore. And if they’re constantly telling you that angry is bad, or a moral failing, or some sh—stuff,” Critt smirks at Kylo’s almost slip, “like that, you just get angrier.”

“What’s a good thing?” Critt asks.

“Fighting makes me feel better. If I’m having a hard day, I go beat on the training droids until I feel better. It doesn’t solve the problem, but it helps burn off enough anger to get into a mindset where I can at least start to think about solving whatever’s putting me off balance. And once I solve it, it’s even easier to stay in balance.”

“Rey says I’m not allowed to hit Muni and Elias.”

“Your older sister and brother?” Kylo asks. He’s fairly sure he’s got the right family, but it’s a good idea to be right.

Ostrae nods. “Yes.”

“Rey’s right, you’re not allowed to hit people, or animals, or anything that can feel pain. I don’t hit people, anymore, either.” He can feel Critt seeing the holovids of the fight on Qualee Prime. _Just go with it. Some lessons probably aren’t appropriate for a seven-year-old. We can talk more, later, when it’s just us, okay?_

_Okay._

“But…” he can feel her sense of the emotion for a second before she says it, “it makes me feel better. They yell or cry, and I feel good.”

He’s been there. And he’s felt that same joy of pain in Hux, too. Felt the joy in _hurting_ Hux, too. “I know. You hurt, so you hurt them, and it makes you feel good, for a little bit, right?”

“Yes!” Her eyes are bright. “They can do… everything… But they can’t make me not hurt them.”

Kylo nods. “Yeah. I know.” And he does. He can remember feeling… better… in control, powerful… for a little bit, at least. He remembers the huge surge of it after he killed M’Gll. That lasted for days, until Snoke proved that control was the top of the list of things Kylo didn’t have. “Doesn’t last long, does it?”

She shakes her head. He hands her a cookie. “Things that make you hurt less, not just pass it around, or hurt other people, but genuinely make you feel better, they last longer. What do you like doing?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“Eating cookies?” Kylo asks, watching her snarf it down, fast.

“Cookies are good.”

“Want to learn how to make them?” Kylo asks.

Ostrae blinks at him. “Make cookies?”

“Why not? We’ve got a kitchen. We’ve got ingredients. They don’t take that long. And the sooner you find something you actually enjoy, the easier everything else gets. So… come on. Let’s go make some.”

Ostrae blinks at him, and Critt is astonished. “You know how to make cookies.”

“I trained as a Jedi. I know how to do a lot of things.”

“My parents wanted me to be a Jedi,” Critt says.

“Yeah, well… As educations go, it wasn’t a bad one, just… not particularly well-suited for what I’m doing now. At least, not the way Luke taught it,” Kylo says, getting down a few bowls, putting them on the table. “If you’ve got any desire to go live off in the middle of nowhere, and survive well, it’s handy.”

“So, you got the education Rey needed,” Critt says

“I’ve got some skills she could have used.” He feels her amusement at that idea. She’s ‘reading’ but mostly paying attention to what they’re doing, but keeping herself absent so her darklings can have some time on their side of the balance. “Okay: eggs, butter, sugar, salt, flour, bicarbonate of soda…” He’s looking around. Rey eats her midday meal here every day, and these days they tend to do breakfast here, too, but neither of them do a lot, or any, baking. That said, there’s got to be something to liven these up. Nuts, or dried fruit, or… “Uh… This’ll work.” He grabs a chocolate bar and puts it on the table. “Ostrae, crack the eggs into the bowl. Critt, turn on the cooker, put it at 180.”

“You really know how to do this,” Critt sounds astonished.

Kylo half-shrugs. He’s always had something of a sweet tooth. And because on the days when they were working hard, they needed a lot of calories in a dense, easily eaten form, he and the other kids were able to convince Luke that some sort of sweet, fatty, yummy thing was important on work days. (Luke, may have had a sweet tooth. He didn’t always manage to cover how much he liked the cookies, too.) Kylo sets the butter on the cooker. This’ll work better if it’s soft. “You good enough with a knife to chop this into small pieces, without cutting off a finger?” he asks Critt.

Critt nods, taking the chocolate, a cutting board and the knife and getting to it.

Kylo’s showing/helping Ostrae measure out the ingredients when she says, “What do you like doing? What makes you feel good for a while?”

He feels Critt smirk and think _Rey._

Kylo smirks back at that, and thinks at him. _Yes, quite a lot, and as often as we can._ He feels Rey sniggering in the other room at that, too.

Critt’s eyes widen. His parents would have _never_ admitted something like that.

 _Being married is_ good, _but that’s another conversation for later,_ Kylo thinks to him. He answers out loud with, “I like fighting. I’m really good at it, so it makes me feel good for more than a few minutes. I like what I’m doing with the Order… Trying to make something… good. That’s a lot harder than fighting. I’m not naturally talented at it. But it’s satisfying in a way that, when I feel like I’m doing it right, feels really good.” He puts the butter in the bowl Ostrae dumped the sugar in, “Okay, we’re going to mush these together.”

Ostrae likes mushing them together. She’s got her fork and is whacking and mixing with glee. Kylo’s pretty sure that if he can get her fighting, too, she’s going to like it _a lot._

“What about when it’s not going well?” Critt asks as he continues chopping up the chocolate.

“I go through a lot of training droids.” He pours the eggs over the smashed up butter and sugar. “We’re going to mix them up.” He shows Ostrae how to do it. “And then come home and snuggle with Rey. It might just be me, but I find it easier to balance when there’s someone I enjoy being with. That said, being able to do it alone is likely important, too.”

“Can you do it alone?” Critt asks.

“I sincerely hope to never have to find out.” He eyes the butter, sugar, egg mixture. “I think that’s mixed enough. Let’s put the dry ingredients in.”

“What do you wish you hadn’t done?” Critt asks.

 _Speaking of conversations that_ are not _appropriate for a seven-year-old… Really,_ later.

Critt blinks at him, and nods.

“That’s harder to answer. There are things that I look back on and wish I hadn’t done, but I don’t know how I could be here if I hadn’t done them, and I think being here matters, so… I don’t know. Do you think the Force has a plan?”

Both of the kids are used to Rey asking open-ended questions like that, so they take the time to think about it as Kylo mixes in the chocolate, and then shows them how to make the dough into little balls.

“If it has a plan… Why not me?” Ostrae says, voice quiet, looking at the cookie dough. “My brother and sister were good enough for it. Why not me? Why don’t I get to be part of the plan?”

Kylo gently rests a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t know why you or not you. I do know good has _nothing_ to do with it, at all. The worst person I or anyone else ever met had more Force power than the rest of us put together. And plenty of the people around him, happily off doing evil left and right for the fun of it, had no Force powers. The Force may have a plan. Sometimes I’m afraid it doesn’t. But I _know_ it couldn’t care less about how good, or kind, or smart, or anything positive a person is before it loads them up with powers.”

“Afraid?” Critt asks.

“Do enough evil, survive long enough to look back at it, and you’ll start to hope there’s a plan, too.”

“Oh,” Critt says, and Ostrae’s looking up at him.

 

 

“And, powers or not, if there’s a plan, you’re part of it. I know you’ve heard the story of Chewie and Luke rescuing my father from Jabba the Hutt, right?”

They blink. Neither of them knew Kylo Ren is the son of Han Solo.

“Uh… Yeah. Second-hand. I wasn’t here when Chewie told the story,” Critt adds.

“Okay, so… Why was Luke even able to put that plan into play?” He gives Ostrae’s shoulder a little squeeze. “Because my dark, non-Force-sensitive dad swooped into the battle at the last possible second and shot down the Imperials, saved his life, and made sure he could take the shot at the Death Star.

“And how did the war end? Vader tosses the Emperor into the power array?” Kylo scoffs. “That’s the way I always heard it. But that’s _wrong_. That’s Luke’s version of the story, focusing on the fancy magic bits and the redemptive power of the _light side_ ,” there’s a lot of sarcasm in Kylo’s voice as he says that, “but if Vader hadn’t turned, if Luke had died up there, the war would have ended exactly the same. Because my dark, non-Force sensitive Uncle was up there in the _Falcon_ , taking the core out. Even the Emperor couldn’t survive a Death Star blowing up under him. And how did Lando Calrissian get to do that? Because down on Endor, my dark, non-Force sensitive Dad, and my dark, Force sensitive, but completely untrained Mom, with the help of my other dark, non-Force sensitive Uncle, took out the shields. Yeah, we all hear about Luke Skywalker’s heroic turning of Vader at the last moment, but that didn’t win the war. That did nothing to alter the course of the war. That’s… Jedi propaganda.”

Kylo looks at the little blobs of cookie dough, all rolled into tidy little balls. “Let’s get these in the oven.” Critt grabs the tray and slides it into the cooker. Kylo returns his attention to Ostrae. “Maybe you really like making cookies. Maybe, like my dad, or Poe, you decide you want to be a pilot, maybe… There’s something out there you’re going to really like, and when you find it, you can turn your dark to it. Passion, attachment, desire, all of those things will give you the power to become _very_ good at whatever it is you really like doing. It lets you look at what you’re doing, and see how it can be better, instead of just sitting back and saying, ‘That’s good enough.’ You’ve just got to find it.”

“How do you find it?” Ostrae asks.

“I suppose that’s another advantage of a Jedi education, or a Maji one, you’re going to try your hand at a _lot_ of things. Sooner or later, one of them will stick.”

 

 

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, when the cookies are out, and cool enough to eat, Ostrae looks at Kylo, munching one of them, and says, “I like making cookies.”

Kylo smiles at that.   

 

 

* * *

“Well,” Jacen says as soon as Critt gets back to the cottage they share.

Critt holds up a plate with several cookies on it, and sees his friends all goggle at him. Technically speaking, the cottage is just his and Jacen’s, but Elias is there any given time, and Magiit and Savarah tend to be along as well.

And, like usual, they’re there as well, all of them waiting to see how his ‘after dinner chat’ with Kylo Ren went.

“We made cookies,” Critt says, putting the plate down on the table, as his buddies crowd around to get some.

“Kylo Ren makes cookies?” Savarah says, doubt arcing through her.

“Kylo Ren makes cookies, without having to look a recipe up. Apparently, learning this was part of training as a Jedi,” Critt adds.

That stops all of them as they sit there, munching away on some fairly tasty chocolate chunk cookies, pondering the idea that making cookies was part of Jedi training.

Critt sees them all thinking about with wonder in their minds and says, “Yeah. That. All of that. For like an hour. He’s…”

“Not what you were expecting,” Jacen adds. “First time I met him, I was expecting to have to fight for my life.”

“You mean talk for your life,” Elias says.

“Well, yeah. I wouldn’t want to actually _fight_ him.”

“But you’re going to. He’s going to be doing some real training with us. I could feel that. We’re big enough he thinks he can really work with us,” Critt adds, and again his friends all contemplate that.

“So, did you just make cookies?” Magiit asks.

“Nah. I don’t think he was planning that. Rey made some, and we were eating them, and we got talking about… how to…” he’s never tried to explain the dark to any of his balanced or lightsider buddies, “not… feel angry and hurt and… just dark all the time.” His friends all sort of nod at that. Magiit can’t feel his dark, but the rest of them can. And even though he hasn’t talked about it before, but they all _know._ “He was talking about finding something you like doing—“

“What does he like doing?” Elias asks.

Critt sniggers. “He said fighting and the stuff he’s doing with the Order, but I thought _Rey_ at him, and he looked me full in the eye and thought back at me _Yes._ ” The rest of them all break into scandalized giggles at that idea. They’re all old enough to know that Rey and her man don’t just snuggle at night, but… There’s knowing and there’s _knowing_.

“How do you get from doing Rey to cookies?” Jacen asks, very amused by this.

“Ostrae was with me.” They all share a look. Critt is dark, and they know his feelings can get awfully twisty and hurtful, but he keeps them bottled up and aimed at himself. When he’s in a dark mood, and projecting it, he makes them sad. Ostrae scares them. Her feelings get twisty and hurtful, and then she aims them at other people. “And she didn’t know what she liked. But she’s just tearing through the cookies, so he asks if she might want to learn how to make them.”

“Did she?” Elias asks, excited. If there’s a chance that there’s something his little sister likes doing, something that makes her feel better than hitting or pinching or biting other people, he’s going to be all over it. “I mean, we’ve got room, we can get a stove in our cottage.”

“She did. You think it’ll help?”

“Assuming she doesn’t burn down our cottage, it won’t hurt.” Elias rubs his shin. He doesn’t have a bruise there because he could heal the damage, but a non-Force sensitive would. He and his sister Muni have been trying for years to keep Ostrae in some sort of line, and when she was a toddler and baby, they could just pick her up and hold her, but she’s getting too big for that, now.

“So… It was good?” Savarah asks, eating another cookie. “These are.”

“Yeah,” Critt says. “Weird. We’ve got, like… I don’t know, a bunch of things to talk about later. Maybe one on one, maybe with us,” he gestures to mean them, the older members of the group, “but I think it was good.”

“What didn’t he want to talk about there?” Elias asks, and the conversation rolls on from there.

 

 

* * *

Somehow, from one child to another, it’s before dawn that the entire settlement at Lirium knows that Kylo Ren, Master of the Order, the one-time Jedi Killer, makes cookies.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey Guys,
> 
> So, if all goes well, we should have our usual Sunday update. 
> 
> But...
> 
> See, I'm (as of this moment) about a hundred miles north of the edge of where Hurricane Flo is gonna hit. Now, I'm on high ground, and have enough provisions to see out the end times, and a car full of gas if we need to bug out, so we're in no real danger, but the power goes out here if someone sneezes wrong in the vicinity of the wires, and we've had both a long wet summer and a billion and a half trees right next to power lines. 
> 
> Anyway, gods willing, I'll be posting on Sunday, but if you don't hear anything from me, it just means that one of those billion trees took out my power. If you want updates on when I may be posting again, go online and see how much of Virginia is without power. When central VA is lit up again, I will be, too.
> 
> Oh, and yeah, Come to the dark side, we have cookies, is my last, 'I spent 300,000 words to set up a joke' joke. ;)


	56. A Dress For Lady Ren

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, we survived the "hurricane." Actually, we got maybe .5 inches of rain, and wind gusts of up to 11 miles an hour, so... no thrilling tales of surviving the tough times. (Though they did cancel school, and I did have both boys home with me on Friday, but that's not exactly harrowing.) I'm grateful to have not been a few hundred miles south, where the local wildlife is learning to swim and the local people are figuring out what to do with waterlogged lives. 
> 
> Thank you all for the good wishes and the hopes for safety. At least on my end, it all worked out! :)

12/11/1 

 

Kylo’s on draft six of his first year anniversary speech. It’s flowing like… Hardened plasteel. When he wrote the first of the Order speeches, it didn’t exactly go tumbling directly from his head to the keyboard, but it also wasn’t like this. He more or less knew what he wanted to say, and all he had to do was put that together in a way that didn’t make him look like a raging twit as he said it.

That’s not happening this time.

He feels like he can, almost, touch what he’s looking for, but… It’s not there, yet.

Getting closer, but… He keeps seeing the attack on Qualee, and can feel the conversation with D’Vrys. There’s something in there, but it hasn’t clicked, not yet.

And he’s got the sense that until it does, he’s going to be typing a lot of words he’s going to just turn around and delete.

He hears C8’s feet clacking against the floor, but doesn’t look up. “Lt. Colonel Frakes is here.”

“Send him in.” Kylo checks his chronometer. He’d been expecting Frakes later than… No, he really did spend more than an hour working on… he sighs… nine words and one comma. He glares at the sentence and deletes the comma. He stuffs the datapad into his desk, and stands up, pleased to see Jon.

Jon’s got a huge bag under his arm, and two sketchpads. Kylo darts forward to take the bag from him. “How much did you bring?”

Jon smiles. “Way more than I needed. But with her coloring, she’ll look good in almost anything, so I’ve got a lot of samples to work with.”

Kylo eyes the bag. “I’d say.” He opens the door to his room, and puts it on his bed, Jon following behind him, laying out his sketch pads on the table. “I got your letter last night. I appreciate it, and yes, I’d like to talk more with you about that, but later.”

Jon nods. “Yeah, we’re pretty well-over scheduled until after the first year party. But, after. You, me, Rey, that dinner she invited me to, we’re going to sit down and have a real talk about… a lot of things, I’d think.”

“Good,” Kylo replies. “More than one, likely.”

Jon smiles a bit at that.

Kylo glances around. “Wasn’t your mom or sister coming here with you?”

Jon doesn’t laugh. He does smirk. “No. Not yet. She’ll be here for the final fit and cut. She’ll trust me to get the design in place, and do the rough cut and baste, then she’ll see it live, and decide what needs to be adjusted.”

It’s clear on Kylo’s face that he’s not impressed by that.

Jon sighs. “Kylo, my mother hasn’t left Coruscant for a client since the Emperor’s mistress was in need of formal ball gowns. According to her, that was the last time there was someone with enough status to make it worth her while to move. Anyone lower than that goes to her. These days she only takes clients who are recommended by other clients. Plural. You know how I said that people who know fabric will know that what you’re wearing is rare and expensive?”

Kylo nods.

“Okay, every dress she makes has her mark on it somewhere. The ones made start to finish by my sisters have the mark in thread. The ones my mother touches have the mark in a special gold stamp. Fewer than twenty gowns a year have that mark on it, and when people see it they’ll _know_ your woman is among the ultra-elite. That she’s got something that money, fame, and power can’t buy. She’s got _status._ ” And while Kylo cares bugger all for status for himself, Rey is an entirely different story. He wants people to treat her like he does, like his _queen,_ and anything that makes that more likely, he’s in favor of _._

“Did you invite her to the celebration?”

Jon smiles. “Not only did I invite her, but I got her to agree to come, along with my oldest sister. Most of the people who are coming to this will _understand_ this gesture. They may not know Rey, but they’ll know her place in the pecking order, and they’ll know it’s a lot higher than theirs. Plus, she’s famous for designing wedding dresses, so this might cut down on the number of boobs getting rubbed in your face.”

“Good.” Kylo notices that Jon’s got one of the sketch books open, and is paging through it.

“You don’t have to show me the sketches, Jon.”

“Mum would cut my head off if I showed _you_ the dress sketches. These are for you,” Frakes says. “You didn’t ask for them. But I’m fairly sure you want them.”

He flips to the image of a badge. The insignia of... Kylo knows what it is the second he sees it. The Order of the Maji.

“This is where you want to go… eventually?” Jon asks. A black field within a silver hexagon, inside it the silver circle, and in that, the Order’s black and white rays swirling into the gray. “This is our mark, right?”

Kylo’s holding it, staring at it, like he’s looking at the future. Like Jon just stole a million words and two or three dreams right out of his head and put them together on a piece of paper. When he said Kylo hadn’t put his mark on the Order yet, it was because he didn’t know what it was, yet. He does now. Kylo nods slowly, “The Order of the Maji.”

“And do I get to find out what a Maji is, now?”

Kylo pulls a chair over for him, with a gesture and a second of effort, and without a single bit of his physical body coming in contact with any part of the chair.

“The Force.”

Kylo nods, and Jon sits. Kylo seats himself while saying, “A new Jedi. No longer bound to the Light. A new Sith, no longer ruled by the Dark. Bringing both of them back together and wrapping them into a balance that reflects the true nature of the Force. Light, dark, swirling together into gray. Expanding that outward, so that _everyone_ benefits from it, no longer some near-secret cabal only for the powerful and enlightened.”

Jon nods, and Kylo can feel him debating if he should actually say it. He remembers what Rey said about not fearing Kylo, so… “Fine. Order of the Maji. Great. What if you can’t…” and he wiggles his fingers at the sketch pad Kylo’s looking at, and as expected, it just sits there on the table.

“It’s about balance, Jon. If it were only there for people who can…” he floats the pad over the table, “then it wouldn’t be very balanced, would it?”

“So… anyone could be a Maji?”

Kylo smiles a bit. “Anyone interested in being part of the balance. And you… this is more for that long conversation later, but you’re part of the balance.”

Jon smiles a bit at that. There’s a warm wash of belonging from Kylo as he says that, and Jon’s looking forward to that conversation. “So, You’re the Order. She’s the Maji…”

“We’re both Maji, and eventually, we’ll both be Order. And one day, so will you.”

Jon doesn’t look as convinced about that. He does look fairly pleased to flip to another sketch, this one he rips out of the pad. “It’s a state dinner, and I don’t know how much attention you pay to the clothing of the women—“

“Minimal. I notice when they’re wearing too much of it or not enough.”

“Okay. Women wear jewelry to these things. Actually, a lot of men do, too, but that’s a different conversation for a different day. That jewelry is often given to them by people who matter to them. Usually at their wrists, throats, and ears. Her ears aren’t pierced, so I’m not going there, and depending on which one she chooses, the dress will take care of her wrist. She’s already wearing a ring I’m awfully sure you gave her.” Kylo nods. Jon lays the sketch before him. “This is for you, to give to her.”

Kylo’s looking at it. At first glance, it’s deceptively simple, but only the first glance. The second, third… Kylo’s smiling at it. “What is it?”

“The way I see it, the base is platinum, the inlay is ebony and mother of pearl. But that's just my version, you could modify it.”

Kylo shakes his head. He can't even begin to dream of a way to make this better than its current incarnation. It’s a hexagon of platinum, in the center is a Rey’s circle-swirl of light and dark into gray, wrought in ebony and mother of pearl. The gleaming sheen mother of pearl shimmers with whorls of greens and blues and silvers. The ebony is polished, gleaming, tightly-grained veins of black and gray. Both materials swirl into each other. They’ve got to be laser cut to make the lines so fine, but by the center they’ve blurred into a shimmery bluish-gray. It’s maybe the size of the pad of his thumb, and hangs from what he assumes is a platinum chain.

The image of placing it around Rey’s neck is so pleasurable that Kylo’s not sure what to do with it. The idea that there would be a tangible sensation of electricity through his skin at just the idea of slipping that around her neck would have never occurred to him.

But he can see it, feel it, laying it against her skin, kissing her throat before closing the clasp on the chain.

“You can make this?”

“No. But I can have it made. Should I?”

“Yes.” His voice strokes over that word, like his fingers stroke over Rey’s skin. Kylo clears his throat, embarrassed that that much naked pleasure was audible in his tone.

Jon’s smiling at him, looking very self-satisfied. “I’m going to have so much fun with this. So… Does she come here? Do I go to her? How does this work? How… does she even get here?”

“All things are possible with the Force,” Rey says. “I’m the she in question, correct?”

Kylo nods, tucking that sketch into his tunic, fast.

Jon stands up to greet Rey, offering her his hands, and giving her a little squeeze. She looks amused but allows it. When he lets go, she embraces Kylo. “Having fun?”

He smiles at her. “Always.”

“Okay, lovely.” Jon points to the door. “Off you go. I’m under orders from my mom that you don’t get to even get a hint of this before you see it on her.”

Kylo raises one eyebrow, and then sarcastically says, “Yes, sir,” before heading off. Rey can feel him chuckling in his head at that.

Once Kylo’s out of the room, she says to Jon, “He appreciates that.”

Jon’s not sure what she means.

“You, acting like he’s just a person. He likes that.”

“Good.” Jon looks at her. There’s some edge in his voice, but not a lot, as he says, “He says you were part of the Resistance.”

Rey shrugs a little. “More like I was next to it for a while, and made some really good friends there. I had exactly one mission with them, go get Luke Skywalker, and bring him back, and I… failed… maybe, at it.”

“Maybe?” Jon’s eyeing her with an eyebrow raised, trying to see more than the pretty, pleasant girl in front of him. Trying to see the _Rey_ under the cute exterior.

“He showed up, sort of, at the last possible moment, fought Kylo, at least that's what we thought was happening at the time, gave us enough distraction to get a few of us out of Crait, and then died. When I left to go get him, I, and everyone else, had a different outcome in mind.”

“What did you think was going to happen?” Jon asks as he takes out the sketch book that has Rey’s dresses in it, sitting at the table.

She sits next to him, not rolling her eyes, but a level of discomfort at her own naiveté is clear. “I thought I’d find Luke, train as a Jedi, both of us, together, would return to the Resistance, fight off the First Order, and win the war. Two Jedi and a few dozen fighters, versus, what, three million of you? That’s a fair fight.” She sighs as how magnificently stupid that idea was. “That idea lasted until I actually met Luke, who was just about as interested in it as you are in _…_ What are you vehemently not interested in?”

Jon shakes his head. They don’t need to go there right now.

Rey continues, “Then I was thinking maybe I could get Kylo, turn him back to Ben, prove to Luke and Ben that they were wrong about each other, and then the _three_ of us could restart the Jedi. I went to Kylo, and then we killed Snoke, and for a heartbeat or two it looked like that plan was going to work, but it didn’t… Ben, on any level I’d understood him, had either never existed or been dead for decades by the time I got to him. But, that was the whole thing, Luke, on any level I’d understood him, also never existed or had died decades earlier. Same with the Jedi, probably the New or Old Republic… Nothing was the way it was supposed to be, so… It’s not.

“Now it’s the two of us, the Jedi are dead, so’s the Resistance, the First Order, Snoke, and Luke, all of it, and… We’re moving somewhere new.”

Jon nods. “I can get behind new.”

“Good.”

Jon opens the first of his sketchbooks. “So, if we’re going to new, let’s talk _new._ Formal wear. Gowns, dresses, casual wear for when you’re here, the look of Lady Ren.”

Rey takes a breath, feeling like she’s about to jump off a cliff, and then says, “Okay, show me _new._ ”

“Formal wear first. My mom started with the saree as the main inspiration. We can’t quite do that, not for your first formal dinner, it’s too… concentrated. There are only a few dozen planets where that look is common, so, later, when you’ve got your place here more set, you can move onto that, but for right now, we’re sticking with more galactic standard wear.”

That means almost nothing to Rey, and it’s clear from the look on her face.

Jon goes back a few levels. “Most of the stodgy old fuddy-duddies consider having your low back and waist bare to be shockingly immodest. I can cut the décolletage” it’s clear Rey doesn’t know that word, so Jon gestures to her chest, “down to your navel, but Force forbid anyone see the curve of your low back.” He rolls his eyes at that. “Eventually, you get to wear whatever the hell you like. You’re the _fucking Empress_ and you _make_ fashion, not the other way around, but we’re going to need to let at least a little time pass so you can claim that place. So for this one, it’s probably best not to have everyone assuming you’re on Kylo’s arm because you’ve seduced him, or that he has you on his arm because he’s shallow enough to pick a mate with his shaft.”

She sighs, not enjoying that.

“Yeah, I know. It’s a pain in the butt. This time next year, you want me to drape you in three meters of translucent silk, and let it all hang out, and I will. And a week later, twenty billion other women will be doing it, too. The fuddy-duddies will still talk, but you’ll have been around so long, and so many others will follow whatever trend you set, it won’t much matter.”

Rey’s not sure which is more terrifying, being gossiped about by mean-minded ‘fuddy-duddies” or having 20 billion women attempting to copy everything she does. She settles on the fuddy-duddies. “But they will talk.”

“They always have and always will. Their lives are so barren and shallow that they have nothing better to do than gossip about people who are actually doing things with their lives. Nothing you can do about that. Try not to feel to the hurtful things, and have someone with open ears to listen for things that might be useful.”

She rolls her eyes at that.

“Give it time. You’ll meet people here. Find friends.”

Rey looks skeptical, but says, “Show me the sketches.”

Jon flips to the first of them. And Rey doesn’t gasp, but she does inhale sharp and fast. It’s a good likeness of her, in a long, flowing gown. The bodice comes to just above her chest, the fabric of it twining over her right shoulder, draping down her arm to clasp her wrist, and wrapping around her waist, to trail behind her.

“The colors are just suggestions. I’ve got a stack a fabrics you can look at, touch, and decide with.”

In the sketch, it’s light pink gown, a hint of flush, and the drape is a shimmery coral color.

“I’ll trip over it.”

“No you won’t. If the Force lets him fight in a cape and cowl, it’ll keep you upright in a long gown for a dinner.” Though Jon decides that whatever dress she picks, it’s going to the floor, and he’s not putting her in heels. The Force may help, but he might as well not tempt fate.

She’s still staring at the sketch, almost, but not quite touching it. Jon can feel her staring at it like she just doesn’t _belong_ in it. Like it’s a piece of art she can’t touch. “Stop that,” he says to her.

“What?”

“That. Thinking you aren’t worth this. It’s written all over your face. If anyone catches that on you, they’ll decide you’re right about you and never let you forget it, so quit it.”

That’s more or less every nightmare Rey’s ever had about this.

Jon keeps talking, “You may not know the ins and outs of manners and decorum. So what? You can learn that.” He flips the sketchbook shut. This is the simplest of the designs, and if it’s overwhelming her, they’re going nowhere. He turns in his seat so he’s looking at her. “Focus on me.” Then he gestures to the _Supremacy_ , to Kylo’s office, and to the galaxy outside the viewport. “Do you believe in this? Approve of it? Think it’s important and worth building? Do you want this to work? Are you as committed to this as he is, or is it just something he does between breakfast and dinner and tells you about later?”

Rey blinks. She’s so used to thinking of what it is she does as the balance that she doesn’t normally consider his part of it, but, like Kylo’s said, it doesn’t balance if it’s just her. “Yes. Doing this, making it work, matters.”

“Good.” He taps the pad. “This is the uniform. It’s a way to convey power, purpose, and importance. It’s a language, and I know you don’t speak it, but if you want this to succeed, it’s time to learn. My mom will tell you there’s no powerful man anywhere in the galaxy who managed to succeed without and equally strong woman watching his back, so, let’s do this.

“First things first, _Lady Ren,_ get out of the mindset that you aren’t worthy of this. I don’t know the details of your story or his, but I know what a man in love looks like and does, and he’s doing this for _you._

“The man is laying a galaxy at your feet, so pick the damn thing up, help him carry it, and let’s get going.”  

Rey can see Kylo’s outstretched hand, and feel the heat of a burning throne room. “I was going to turn him, get him back for the Resistance, for the Jedi, for _me_. If I could have gotten him back, then… we’d never have to be alone again. I dropped myself here. And he took me to Snoke. Snoke was torturing me, had ordered Kylo to kill me, and he killed Snoke to keep it from happening. Cut him in half. We fought off the Guard together, and the throne room was on fire, your ships were decimating what was left of the Resistance, and he reached out a hand and asked me to join him, and I couldn’t. Not then.

“He was burning and destroying everything around him, and didn’t have any plans to build, so I couldn’t go along with him.”

Jon hadn’t known or even guessed any of that. “He’s building now.”

“I know.”

“And he’s building it either for or because of you.”

“I know.” And she does. It doesn’t balance if it’s just her, and it doesn’t balance if it’s just him, and if it had been just him… The Order would have likely burned out long ago, because Kylo would have burned out long ago. On their own… He would have gotten himself killed in one fight or another, or just blown the whole thing up one day, and she would have given up, lost focus, and likely joined Chewie in the _Falcon_.

Jon opens the sketchbook again. “So tell me, Lady Ren, who is inspiring a shift in the politics and alliances of the entire galaxy, who’s more worthy of something pretty than that? Some flighty little girl who’s never done anything more important than decide if sherry or port should be served with dessert? Or the woman who’s inspired a complete rebuild of the most powerful military force in the skies? You are his _queen,_ so let’s dress you like it.” Jon flips open the sketchbook, and says, “Look. Tell me what you like.”

 

 

* * *

They aren’t just pretty. They’re achingly beautiful. Rippling flows of satin, lace, and silk. Colors she’s only ever dreamed of. Sparkly jewels in ornate patterns along the edges of fabric so delicate it looks like it exists only in dreams.

And each one is more… everything… than the next.

But there’s one she keeps coming back to. Part of it is the construction. It’s simpler than a lot of the dresses. Just a sheath, banded with a simple belt, and on the right shoulder some sort of band. Between the band and the belt is a long flow of fabric, wrapping around the dress’s back to settle at her left side. On the right, there’s another flow of fabric, draping from her hip to the floor. And from the front of the band, one more flow, layering to about her knees.

Part of it is the color. In the sketch, and yes, Jon has said the colors are just suggestions, but she likes this one. It’s a hybrid of soft, muted greens and purples bleeding into a sunset orangy-coral. She’s never seen, or dreamed of that combination of colors, and it just makes her feel good to see them.

There’s the detail work, a line of… She’s tapping them on the sketch. “Garharian crystals. They grow them in a special lab so when they hit the light they reflect in different colors.” Rey nods at Jon. In the sketch they match the dress, glinting in greens and purples, flashes of copper. They’re laid into the belt and the shoulder band.

“Is that the one?” he asks when she’s been looking at it for more than ten solid minutes. He knows they’re making at least four of these for her, but he’s awfully certain _this_ is the one for the dinner.

Rey nods. “That’s the one.”

“Good.” Then Jon gets up and opens the bag of fabrics.

“I really like the color on the sketch.”

“I know, but… Just… _look._ You’ll need other dresses for other days, so… Let’s see what you like.”

 

 

* * *

It’s almost like food. When she started getting the chance to eat real food, Rey tried, and more or less liked, everything. Because it was new. And different. And made her feel… not always good, but like her tongue and belly were foreign things that she needed to put through their paces and explore.

These days, she has preferences, likes, dislikes, things Kylo knows not to bring home. Things she won’t make herself eat. Things she won’t try because she knows they involve other things she doesn’t like.

But that’s not part of her world here. Not with fabrics. She’s barely dipped her toe into the pool of what’s available and Jon is laying out meter after meter of colors and textures and patterns and… It’s just _so much._

Some of them he pulls out, looks at, looks at her, and stuffs back into the bag.

“I liked that one,” she says of a bright, shocking neon-yellow-green.

“Which is fine, but that one doesn’t like you.”

Rey looks confused.

“The color’s not going to be good on you.”

“How do you know that?”

He shrugs. “I just do. And if my mom sees I’ve let you have that color, she’s going to smack me upside the back of the head and tell me I’m colorblind, so let’s not go there.”

That amuses Rey, and it’s not like he’s not putting half a dozen more colors/patterns out for her.

Jon’s got a shimmering black in his hands. It’s light, so thin Rey can barely believe it’s not translucent, but it isn’t. He’s eyeing it, and her, and… It’s more than a meter square, and it would cover her if it were wrapped around her. “Would you consider it horrifying to wrap this around you and let me see you in it?”

“No, but… why?”

“Something I’m not supposed to be designing, but can’t make myself not design.”

Rey raises an eyebrow, and heads to the refresher. She’s sure that by horrifying Jon wasn’t thinking of having her wrap it around her clothes.

A moment later she’s holding it around herself, and yes, it more than covers everything. He couldn’t see through it if he tried, and it’s long enough to cover her from chest to below her knees, so… She’s not feeling even remotely immodest in it.

When she steps out, Jon grins. “Yes, that’s exactly how I thought that would look.”

“And what got you thinking about that?” Rey says.

He shakes his head. “Can’t say, not really. But… He pretty much always wears black, and you know, maybe, he doesn’t _always_ have to wear black.”

Rey smiles. “No. Not always. He’s looks damn fine in white, or near white.” She knows he’s seen the light suit in their closet. “What would you call that color?”

“Chalk.”

“Okay, he looks damn fine in chalk.”

Jon’s smiling. “And… if there were to be… Some sort of big celebration… Maybe with a symbolic merging of power and spheres of influence… Maybe he wouldn’t wear black to that… Maybe he’d wear whatever your colors are. And maybe… for a night… you’d wear black…” If Jon’s grin got any wider, he’d be in danger of dislocating his jaw.

Rey laughs a little at that. “Ah…” Then she looks at the hundreds of pieces of fabric laid out around her. And then decides she should put some clothing back on, or… “You’re going to measure me, aren’t you?”

“This’ll work a lot better if I do.”

So she goes back to the refresher, grabs Kylo’s bathrobe, and puts it on. It’s too big, by a kilometer, but she figures she can just toss it off for getting measured. When she steps back out Jon goggles. “Oh, Rey, no. Put your clothing back on. I don’t… Not when you’re naked.”

“Oh.” She steps back in and puts her clothing back on, feeling confused.

When she’s out, he says, “When my mom and sister get here, they’ll help with… underthings. And that may involve some naked measuring, but… I wouldn’t… It’d be… inappropriate.”

Rey blinks at that. “Why? I thought you liked men.”

Jon blinks back. “I do like men. I love them. I was married to one.”

“Then why is it inappropriate? I mean… If your sister could… I don’t even know her, and I do know you, so… Why not you?”

Jon looks mildly embarrassed. “Well… uh… besides the fact that I’m fairly sure Kylo’s head would explode at just the idea of me seeing you naked, um… I don’t _just_ like men. I… uh… I like everything. I prefer men, but there are some _fine_ women out there and you are among them, so…”

“Oh. I… Uh…” And now Rey's also mildly embarrassed, too. 

Jon smirks. “I like beautiful things, and beautiful people, and yeah, you’re one of them, so… Yes, I’m a professional, and you’re my boss’s wife, and I hope my friend, so I’m not going to even think about stepping out of line, but… I’m not blind or asexual, so let’s not take this into uncomfortable territory, okay?”

“Okay. If I’d known… I wouldn’t have even thought of it.”

“No problems. There was no reason for you to know. So do you have a problem with maybe wearing black at some point?”

“I really don’t.”

“Good.”

“You said my colors…”

“Yes, that’s part of what we’re doing. You’re the Mistress of the Maji, and… That’s supposed to mean something. You’ve got your mark, the swirling black and white into gray, and I can play with that. You don’t have to settle into just one set of colors, but it’d be a decent plan to have an idea of a recurring theme of colors.”

Rey picks up the silk that goes with the sketch of the dress. “So, if I go for this…”

“It could be something we work into a lot of your outfits, or it could be just for that night. But, especially for every day wear, for non-formal events, it’d be a good plan to give thought to a selection of colors that keep popping up over and over. I’m a romantic and a traditionalist, so if he’s in mostly black, grays, and silver, and then I’d put you in whites, beige, and golds. Just so you contrast each other as much as possible. But that doesn’t have to happen. And really, you look good in almost the entire color wheel, so we could work on the idea that he’s blacks, whites, and grays, and you get colors. That’d be another sort of contrasts, one that would work just fine.”

Rey nods, looking at all the colors laid out around her. The disk is on her throat today, and she gently touches it. “I don’t think Maji have a set color scheme. That’s kind of the idea, we take a little bit of everything, and everyone is welcome.”

“Okay. Do you want to be able to identify Maji in a glance?”

She tugs the disk so it's on top of her shirt, not under it. “The ones who feel connected, have one of these. Maybe not an exact copy. This is the only one that’s a junjan token. But they wear the swirl. There’s a lot of little gray rocks around the lake, and Poe, and some of the kids, have grabbed one, carved the swirl onto it, and worn that.”

“He asks for gray in his wardrobe because that’s Maji to him, right?”

She smiles a little at that, moving through Kylo’s room, finding a silk that’s mottled slate gray, looking a lot like the stone textures near their lake. “Not exactly. I’m supposed to be good, and pure, and Light. And he’s supposed to be evil, and corrupt, and Dark, and… We’re just… not. He’s dark, but intentionally not being evil. And I’m light, but I’m also not exactly a paragon of good. And… when we started talking, when we started this, we were trying to pull each other over to the other side, and eventually, we met in the gray.”

Jon smiles softly at that. “So… It’s not so much Maji as him putting a token of you on his body?”

“We got to gray before we figured out what a Maji is, or even the term, and the Maji is definitely part of the gray, but mostly, the gray, that’s me, it’s him, it’s realizing the past didn’t work and changing the present to make a future together. It doesn’t balance if it’s not both of us, and…” She looks at the silk in her hand, and the pretty colorful one, and… “He’ll be in black and gray for this, right?”

“Unless he’s going to surprise me by finding something off the rack and wearing it, yes.”

She taps the sketch. “This doesn’t have to be just the one fabric?”

“Not at all. The only reason it's one fabric in that sketch is because the fabric I picked has many colors in it.”

“Let’s keep the gems the same, let them spark with colors, and make some of the fabric black, some white, some gray. For… formal things, I’ll wear our colors. For the rest of life, I want the rest of the color wheel.”

Jon smiles. “I like that.” Then he starts stuffing the colored fabrics back into the bag. “We’ll get back to these eventually. Let’s get the dress nailed down, and then we can talk about semi-formal, and just out and about here wear.”

Rey sits down, feeling a little deflated as Jon puts fabrics away. “Why is this so tiring?”

“He asked me the same thing when he was working on diplomacy. I’ll give you the same answer; you didn’t train in this since shortly after you were born. I did. I can do this all day and all night and the next day, too. Now tell me about something you’ve been doing most of your life, and let’s see how long I’ll last at it?”

“You ever scavenge a downed ship?”

“Besides the _Supremacy_ after it got hit, I’ve never even seen a damaged ship. I imagine it’d be exhausting.”

“It is.”

“And you wouldn’t expect me to be good at it two hours into working on it, would you?”

“No.”

“Exactly.” He’s got the colors folded up and back in the bag. Leaving a flurry of blacks, whites, and grays spread around Kylo’s room. He looks around them. “Do you want the gems to flash green, purple, copper, or the whole color wheel?”

“Let’s get all of them. Something on everything I wear should be colorful.”

He nods. And then starts putting more of the fabrics, the blacks, whites, and grays, away. “These have strong cool or warm undertones.”

“That means nothing to me.”

“A lot of blue or red and yellow in the color mix.”

Rey can kind of see that.

“If we’re going to have every color flashing around your waist and on your shoulder, we want neutral shades for the fabrics. That way nothing will clash.”

“I’ll trust you on that.”

That leaves them with what Rey considers a much more manageable pile. There’s twelve fabrics spread around them. “Okay. This. If we do this again, I’m going to find it a lot easier if you pick a selection of fabrics and then leave the final decisions to me. _This_ I can handle.”

Jon nods. “You wouldn’t be the first person to feel that way.” He touches the sketch. “This dress is primarily a sheath of one fabric…” He looks to the fabrics, and Rey understands she’s supposed to be picking what goes where.

She takes up the black again. “This one, for the sheath.”

“Good, the black base will make the white and gray pop.” He touches the sketch again. “There are two separate drapes here, three if you want to split the flow that goes from left to right.”

Rey nods. The black silk has some shimmer to it. Holding it up and moving, there’s an almost molten quality to it. It looks like a glowing liquid. She picks a white that’s muted. Something with no sheen. A white that almost absorbs light. “What is this?”

“Do you know what a burklesween is?”

“No.”

“Then let’s just say this is the lightest, sheerest suede you’re ever going to lay hands on.”

“Okay.” She hands the white burklesween skin to Jon, and picks up the stone textured gray. “Will this work?”

“It’ll work.” 

“So, are we done?” Rey asks.

Jon laughs. “With this one.” He sees Rey slump. “Okay, no more dresses today. I’ve got enough of a feel for what you like I can get other formal and semi-formal things made for you.”

“Thank you.”

“Which takes us to the last bit of this. What you wear when you’re here, but you’re not doing something formal.”

She rolls her eyes a little. “Didn’t we just do this?” she gestures to what she’s wearing, all new things from last week.

“A level up from this. This is… What’d you wear if you and he were just laying around in his rooms, or maybe, if you actually get him out of these rooms, what you’d wear for wandering around the F-deck. This is the equivalent of his trader wear. You need something on along the lines of his command blacks.”

“A uniform?”

“Maybe. For women… A lot of people are under the impression that a woman should never be seen in the same outfit twice—“

“Do these people swim in credits or something? How can you… Just… How?”

Jon half shrugs. His mother wouldn’t be seen in the same outfit twice if her life depended on it. “It’s a different world, Rey. That said, I take it you’re not interested in that.”

Rey can’t even begin to put into words how uncomfortable that idea is.

“Okay, no on that. Then, yes, some sort of uniform, because that’ll give you a reason to be wearing the same thing over and over.” He opens the second sketch book. “He said you’d want something practical. And I know you want armor, so I went for designs you can really move in. I don’t think you’d ever have to fight wearing this, but if you had to, you could.”

These are much more to Rey’s liking. It’s a collection of outfits, most of them variations on the theme of trousers and tunics, or jackets and trousers, or just, nicely made, practical, functional clothing with a little embellishment, but nothing too ornate.

The one she likes the best is… She doesn’t have words for it. “What’s this one?”

“Do you know what a hanyifu is?”

“Not a clue.”

“Okay, the jacket is based on the idea of a hanyifu. Traditionally, that would be an ornate robe, of many layers of thick silks, with a highly ornamental belt, both of which wrap around the person wearing it, and would fall to the floor. I didn’t think you’d like that, so this is a lighter fabric and it comes to your thighs. And then a pair of snug trousers and nice boots.”

Rey nods. “I can wear that.”

“Good. And as long as we keep the same cut, we can do it in a collection of colors. Your ‘uniform’ can be the cut. And if you’ve got a few variations on it, that’s fine.”

Rey keeps looking at it, and then thinks of a memory. It’s not her memory. It’s one she’s seen through Kylo, and understands why this cut appeals to her. Why to a certain extent, it feels right. It’s a variation on a theme of a person she, or he, could have been. “Not brown or tan.”

“Rey?”

“Jedi colors. The robe looks a little bit like the Jedi outfit, and I’m not a Jedi, so… No Jedi colors.”

“Okay. So… I’ve got a belt on these, but… You don’t carry a saber, do you?”

“I have one, but I don’t carry it. It’s… community property, I guess. I built it, but it seems to really like Kylo. I do have a lightstaff, and I do carry that, but not here because… I just don’t need it here.”

“And if you did, things would have gone so bad you’re better off at home.”

Rey glares at him. “And if I did, you better damn well know that I’ll have it in my hand in less than ten seconds and on second eleven I’ll be beating the ever living shit out of whatever got in here.”

Jon nods. “Ah. Okay. Well…”

“Anything he can do with a weapon, I can, too.”

“All right.”

“I’ve fought him to the ground, and I’ve killed half the Praetorian Guard to protect both of us. If anything gets in here, it’s going to die.”

Jon nods again and raises his hands. “Point taken. Do you want… Gloves? Hand guards?” He looks at her. “Or, I mean, you don’t need a clip or scabbard or holster for a staff, right?”

“No. I just hold it in my hand.”

He looks at the only other ‘ornament’ she wears. “Would I be right in thinking he gave you the ring?”

Rey nods. “Yes. That’s the one thing that never comes off.”

“Okay.” Then Jon blinks. “Wait…” He looks more carefully at the token on her neck. “Oh. You… share the token with him. It’s the same one. I thought there were two of them.”

“No, just the one. We swap it. It used to be every day that it went from one of us to the other, but… These days he wears it more than I do.”

Jon looks at it around her neck. “My family isn’t very religious, but my mother has a medal of Saint Slequestor. My father gave it to her. She wears it when she feels stressed or needs ‘strength.’”

Rey nods. “Something like that. Who’s Saint Slequestor?”

Jon shakes his head. “A very long, gruesome story that I don’t much like telling. My father got it when he was training at the Imperial Academy, and there, Slequestor was the patron saint of almost, but not quite, getting your ass kicked into next month.”

“Charming?” Rey half-says, half-asks.

“He thought it was good luck. They all did. And when they got married he gave it to her. She was his luck. She likes telling that part of the story.”

“What part doesn’t she like telling?”

He doesn’t smile at that. “The day his luck ran out. He was wearing it when he got pissed at one of their suppliers, flew off the first Death Star to ream him out, at least, that’s how she tells it, which is why he wasn’t on the Death Star when it blew up. He wasn’t wearing it when the second one went.”

Rey nods. “I’m sorry. How… can you work with… Kylo… us? You know who he is or was, right?”

Jon half shrugs. “I… never met my father. I was born six months after he died. But I know Kylo, and I know who he was, and who his mother was, and… I didn’t blow up Alderaan, you know? My dad was there. He was on the Death Star. He was the guy who made sure things like kyber crystals got to where they had to go to make the laser work… But that’s on him, not me. And… Kylo didn’t blow up the Death Star, either of them. What his parents and family did isn’t on him.”

“No, it’s not.”

He gives her a little side eye. “Is this when you tell me that Holdo’s your mom or something?”

Rey offers him a weary smile. “I don’t know my parents. They left me on Jakku and went on to drink themselves to death. Who or whatever they were likely never impacted your life in any way, shape, or form.”

Jon shakes his head. “That’s not true. I’m here, now, because of you. Directly, in that we’re working on clothing and a look and a plan together, and indirectly because, as I said before, he’s doing this for _you,_ Lady Ren. So, at the very least, they’ve deeply impacted my life, because if I hadn’t gotten that call from Kylo about changing how we did uniforms, and I’ve got to assume that was part of him upending things to make them more to your liking, I would still be putting together the same old uniforms and armor. So, yes, I can say that they impacted my life, quite a bit, but in a way I appreciate.”

“Good.”

“And speaking of what we’re doing. Up you get. Let me get your measurements, and then I can get working on this.”

Rey nods, standing up. “How can you possibly get this done in time? When we work on sewing, just cutting things takes hours.”  

He grabs his tape measure. “Again, practice. Also, I’ve got more than 100 droids that do the work for me. I’ll make the pattern, and program them for the first level of sewing, but human hands won’t do anything with this until we get to the mid-fit. _Then_ I’ll get to it.”

Rey nods. “That makes a lot of sense.”

Jon nods, measuring her from the base of her skull to the bottom of her heel. “Don’t get me wrong. There’s something to be said for doing it by hand, but especially if you’ve got a tight deadline, a droid is worth its weight in gold.”

“I can see that. Uh… How much would one of them cost? We go through clothing pretty fast.”

And from there, Jon measures, and Rey learns more about tailoring droids, and adds something to the list of things to get after their next gambling adventure.

 

 

* * *

Usually, at the end of the day, Kylo goes to Lirium. He takes their supper, and goes _home._ To the part of his life that isn’t on the _Supremacy_ , to the place where he’s not _The Master of the Order._

At the end of the day, at least since they noticed the lack of sound proofing, Rey generally doesn’t go to the _Supremacy._ And, even when she did, it was mostly about getting away from the kids for a bit.

When she and Jon wrap up, she doesn’t return to Lirium. There’s still more than a few hours between now and when Kylo would normally get done with the day, but… Not today.

She looks out his viewport. A billion billion kilometers of space surrounds them. Stars dotting a view without horizon. They’re far enough away that nothing in her sight is larger than a pea. Between systems right now.

There are a few ships behind them. Some flying in distinct and fancy patterns. Training flights if she had to guess.

She can feel he’s working away on the other side of the door. Maybe finally finding his flow on the first year speech, or moved onto something else, but after a few more minutes, where he notices that she’s _still_ here, he gets up, opens the door, and joins her.

“You okay?” he asks, joining her to watch the training exercises. Wrapping his arms around her, and resting his chin against the back of her head.

 

 

“Yeah. I am.” She places her hands on his. “I’ve never said it, but…” She looks out at it, at all of it. “It’s good, Kylo. And I appreciate it. It matters and…” She doesn’t get to finish that sentence because he’s pulled her around and is kissing her, hard and deep.

She can feel his emotions purring at her for that. Loving it. She strokes his hair and back. _It’s good. You’re doing_ good. _It’s everything I could have asked for and then some._

She feels the shudder rush through him, and his body melt against hers. She holds him close, cuddling him to her, watching his ships fly through the sky, watching the galaxy around them, ready to see what comes next.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About the art (or lack thereof) in this one. If you've ever heard the phase 'Your mind is writing checks your body can't cash...' Well, my imagination is making promises my rendering skills just can't deliver on. 
> 
> I'm working on a blog post about that, in more detail, and with pictures of what I was able to render, and what I want the dresses to look like, so if you want a deep dive fashion extravaganza, head over to https://kerylraist.wordpress.com/ later this afternoon, and I should have some goodies up.


	57. On The Throne

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is another REALLY NSFW chapters. (Huge grin.) You have been warned!

12/18/1

 

 

“So, you have droids that actually make most of the clothing?” Rey says as Jon’s basting together the pieces of her dress, making sure he’s got the drape right.

“Once I’ve got the full pattern made, yeah. Why?”

“So, his Padme clothing—“ Rey can see Jon’s utterly clueless about the Padme thing. “Uh… Kylo Ren’s not always the most popular man in the galaxy, and he’s got a few other names he goes by. Padme is one of them.”

Jon thinks that’s a reasonable precaution. “Why Padme?”

“That was the only family name he knew that everyone else wouldn’t hear and immediately know exactly who he is.”

That also makes sense to Jon. “And you call his trader outfit ‘Padme clothing?’ That’s the name he uses with that outfit?”

“Sometimes.” Though with the Maji knowing who Padme is… That name’s likely retired now.

Jon seems to think about that for a moment as he pins another section of the dress. “Okay. Uh… I guess that makes sense. I know he’s gone on a few trips, so… Yeah. Probably can’t take a decent vacation if everyone expects the Master.”

Or they could use it on vacation to go along with Amidala. “It helps to not go by that name. Anyway…”

“Anyway…” He’s looking up at her.

“You were talking about this being a collection of people. And about getting out and getting to know them, and…” She rubs her lips together and stops as soon as she realizes that’s a Kylo gesture. “And he talks about getting to meet or know more of them, too… So, as a favor, for me, could you make one of the droids make him some Padme clothing in black?”

Jon grins. “I can do that. I can have them done by the day after tomorrow.”

Rey smiles back at him. “Excellent.”

 

 

* * *

A few quiet moments go by while Jon nudges and pins, checking the drape, adjusting and readjusting, and Rey stands there feeling like this is something of a waste of time, but… Well, she’s got him here…

“I know he talks to you about politics and how to do this stuff.”

Jon nods, pins in his mouth, attaching one of the long flows of fabric to the waistline.

She sighs. “And I know he’s aware of the idea that it might be a good plan to see his people, and maybe interact with them some, but… He’s nervous about it and not sure if it’s a good plan and… Does an Emperor or… Empress… do better by being familiar or aloof?”

Jon smiles at that. Then he puts the pins down. “Can’t really talk with them in my mouth.”

Rey nods at that. “I’d guess not.”

Jon takes a moment and thinks about it more. “I’m not sure. He’s told you about palaces and castles, right?”

She nods. “Yeah. Building palaces. We’re building palaces.”

“Good. So… And this is just me thinking, I don’t actually know, but I’d think that if you’re warm, and personable, and you make people feel like you can and will solve their problems, or you’ll help them solve their own problems, that you’ll have an easier time fitting into the palace mode. It’s all about making sure people understand that you’re so valuable to the scheme of things that you _have_ to be where you are. Anything else would just be foolish.”

“I can probably be warm and personable.”

Jon can easily see that. “The kids at your school, do they find you easy to talk to?”

“Yes. But they’re easy, too,” Rey says.

“What makes them easy?”

Rey’s never thought about that. “I don’t know. They just are.”

“Maybe because you know it’s going to be okay with them. There’s nothing really at stake, and even if you mess it up, it’s not that big of a disaster?”

“That probably has a lot to do with it. I mean…” She knows how much can be at stake with any given kid one on one, but she also knows that the truly massive screw ups she’s run into were intentional. Maybe not intentionally designed to hurt the kid, but certainly undertaken without taking the kid into account. Like trying to turn someone utterly unsuited for it into a Jedi. “You… I… could really screw one of the kids up, and… That can reach a lot further than most people would expect.”

Jon catches that line and has a feeling there’s a _lot_ about Kylo and his family that he doesn’t know.

“But… I’m not scared of screwing them up. I kind of feel like I know what I’m doing, or… we all don’t know what we’re doing, together. But, I’m…” She looks up and bites her lip. “It’s, I guess, okay if I fail this for me. It’s not okay if I fail it for _him._ ”

Jon smiles a little at that. “I think you’d have to actively work at it to _fail_ this. Don’t make any deals. Don’t spread any gossip. And don’t let the rumors get you down. Stay in those lines, and you’ve more or less guaranteed you can’t _fail_ him.”

“I can do that.”

“Good. And maybe just go get some popcorn and be nice about it. Just, let them see you’re a person.”

“I can do that, too.”

Jon goes back to pinning for a moment, and then says, “You can do that; can he? I’ve seen him work a room, and… after an hour or so it’s pretty clear he’s not having a good time. It probably won’t work all that well if it’s clear he loathes it.”

“I can work on that. You get the black outfit, and… Maybe we’ll get some popcorn.”

 

 

* * *

12/22/1

 

Food eaten, dishes washed, this is normally the part of the day where they move onto more work. An hour or so of… something.

Kylo rolls his eyes with a tepidly sarcastic mental, _yay!_ He’s still got his first year speech, which is going exactly nowhere, or he’s got… He doesn’t know, the stack of datapads on his desk is taller than his forearm is long. All sorts of bits and pieces in there.

Rey shakes her head at him. “Nope. Not today.” Then she heads into their bedroom, and comes out a moment later with black stuff between her hands. Black fabric. No, one of the pieces is fabric, the other is leather.

He raises an eyebrow at her while she hands it over. “We playing a game tonight?”

Two nights ago, they were looking at sexy pictures together and both of them liked the costumes in the pictures. He’d put that down on his list of things to delve deeper into the next time they’re off being the Amidalas, because the little sexy leather number the girl was wearing certainly worked a treat for him, but he can’t imagine Kylo Ren expressing an interest in something like that, let alone attempting to find where to buy one, or… well, buying one. Ben Amidala, on the other hand, can have as many _interests_ as he likes, and he can pursue them as he likes, too.

And the second he puts his Ben Amidala costume back on, pursuing those interests is the absolute top of the list of things he intends to do.

That said, the guy in the pictures was also wearing… something. He wasn’t really paying attention, or looking at the guy, beyond being aware that he was in the pictures and Rey seemed to enjoy him.

So… Fabric, of a clothing-like nature… Rey looking up at him expectantly, though he’s not exactly getting a sense of sexual excitement from her, but he’s got no clue what else this might be, unless he wants to dig deeper into her head… So… This could be a good night.

“I suppose you could call it that.”

He’s looking more carefully at what he’s holding. A black shirt and jacket. If this is a game, he’s out of his depths as to what they’re playing. He looks at it more carefully. “Is this my Padme clothing in black?”

“Yes.”

He rubs his lips together. If this is a game… “Okay… Uh… Yeah, I’ll ask. _Why?"_

She steps up close to him, her hands on his. “Because if I’m going to be queen of this… thing, then I want to see the thing, and the people in the thing, and if I’m doing that, you’re going with me.”

A smile spreads slowly across his face. He licks his lips, looking amused, and glances down at the clothing between their hands. “When he first measured me for this, he asked if I was ever going to be off-duty, and I said was entertaining the notion that at some point I would be.”

She nods, and gives his hands a gentle squeeze. “So, let’s go be off-duty where your people can see us. For a little while, at least.”

“And if we get swarmed?”

“Last I checked, we could both teleport.”

“Okay.” He’s about to pull off his shirt. He’s been in his trousers and his usual under tunic shirt since he got home, and then he stops. “I can probably go out in just this.” He puts the jacket on over it. “Casual, right?”

She shrugs. “I don’t see why not. But… I wouldn’t.”

“Nope.” He takes her hand in his. For a second, he thinks of adding his saber to the outfit, but his belt is on the hook with his tunic, and his saber is actually back in his desk because he didn’t think to hook it back into his belt before he came home. So… “Okay. Uh… Remember what I said about failing with me?”

“I do.”

“Well, let’s give it a shot.”

 

 

* * *

Kylo’s a little embarrassed to admit that he’s got more than 18,000 cubic kilometers of ship, and he’s seen, maybe, five of them. Twenty-five if he counts the ones he’s walked through to get to the ones he’s been in.

And one of them, Snoke’s throne room and chambers, he’s destroyed. (Okay, actually he had the damn thing stripped bare and turned into storage space. He did that after it was gently, patronizingly, as if he were an especially dull and dangerous toddler in bad need of a nap, in front of several other people, explained to him, by Hux, that the _Supremacy_ was holding together by steeltape and the grace of the Force and the last thing it needed was _another_ hole in it.)

Part of it is, as the Supreme Leader and then Master, people come to him. If he wants to see you, you go to him. If you want to see him, you make an appointment and wait for him. It does not work the other way around.

Part of it is a lot of the _Supremacy_ is empty. People are coming in for the festivities, but he’s still not going to get to a quarter of its capacity. Snoke had moved most of the First Order to Starkiller, which turned out to be a fucking awful tactical decision, or the Force picking which side it wanted to see win. But, either way, it left him with a lot of space and not a lot of stuff in the space.

Part of it is that most of his time with the First Order was spent on the _Finalizer_ and he knows that ship inside and out. But ever since he’s been on the _Supremacy,_ he’s been busy in a way he wasn’t on the _Finalizer._

So, to an extent, he’s just as much exploring as Rey is.

They walk through his office to the throne room, and she does glance at his throne. He sees her do it and smirks. She is wearing one of the dresses she got shopping with Jon, and the door does lock… He doesn’t see C8, and hell, it’s a droid, so it’s not like he can embarrass it if it were to walk in at the wrong moment… He licks his lips… On his throne, indeed…

She elbows him gently. “After.”

He grins. “As you wish, my Lady.”

 

 

* * *

It’s a different elevator. And they’re different people. And there’s no real tension here, not now. A little buzz of nervous excitement, because, well, this is new and different, but it’s not both of them standing there, edge of the cliff, getting ready to jump.

She’s just as close as she was the first time. Closer. Her hand is in his.

He looks down at her for a moment, and then closes his hand around the back of her neck, pulling her close, and kissing her long and deep. Her arms wrap around his waist and shoulder, and she kisses back, melting to him.

He moans, soft, low in the back of his throat, and she pushes up even closer.

He feels the elevator stop, and for a second he’s confused because it’s not _that_ fast. He’s on level AA, thirty-two levels below the F deck. Then he realizes she’s stopped the elevator and he grins at her.

 _Looking for some privacy?_ he thinks, still kissing her.

_Thinking about how much I wanted you to do this the first time we were here._

His hands span her hips, and he rocks against her as his tongue finds hers. He’s not hard, yet, but she more than understands the intention of that move. Her turn to groan. When she does, he thinks to her, _I was thinking about it. Tracing your lips with my eyes._ And he didn’t do anything more than that because he could feel Snoke in the back of his head, and he wasn’t about to share that with _him._

 _I knew._ Her hands thread through his hair.

He pulls back a little, looking at her, tracing her face and lips with his eyes, and then fingers. “Would have done it in the… Where were we?” He’s never asked, and she’s never said.

“Ahch-To.”

He’s got no idea what or where that is. “Would have done it there if Luke hadn’t blown the hut up.” Because he didn’t feel Snoke in his head, not there. Just him and her and firelight and reaching out, half-eager, half-afraid.

She traces the tips of her fingers over the tips of his, and then barely brushes his lips with hers. “Like that?”

“Maybe.” He smiles a little, then rubs against her a bit more, rocking his rapidly perking up shaft against her belly, and leans in to kiss her soundly, deeply, wet lips, and tongue mimicking the in-out of slow, lazy sex. When he pulls back he says, “Or maybe something like that.” His eyes have a mischievous spark.

She gives him a little shove. “You would not.”

He shakes his head a bit. “No. Not without an invitation.” He steps back, so their bodies aren’t touching, though he’s holding her hand, and kisses her again. Softly, lightly, just an easy brush of lips on lips, but there’s heat in his mind and eyes, burning through his feelings. “Like that.”

 

 

She returns his kiss, also light and easy, and squeezes her hand in his. “I would have liked that.” She looks up at him again, lightly bites her lip, and says, “What would you have done the first time we were in here?”

He looks down, tracing her eyes and lips with his. His tongue darts out over his upper lip, and then he’s got her pressed against the door, lifted up, her legs around his hips as he’s grinding into her and kissing deep and wet.

He can feel her pleasure at it. Not just in the sense of lips on lips and bodies on bodies feeling good, but in the sense of being pleased with this being the answer.

 

 

He pulls back for a moment, saying, “I figured there were better than even odds we’d be dead in less than an hour. If I was going to go for it, I might as well have _gone_ for it.”

She’s giggling at that, and rubbing against him in a very pleased sort of way, and he’s rubbing back, enjoying the feel of her on him, and the just sheer, wrong, naughtiness of doing it in an elevator and, he’s leaning in for another kiss…

“This is Maintenance Team A-46. The elevator has been stopped for more than two minutes. Do you require assistance?” It’s just a voice in their space, but it has the effect of being thrown into an ice cold lake.

They’re both silent and still for a second followed by Kylo saying, “No, we’re fine. Everything is fine.”

“Good. We’re recommencing service.”

And they feel the elevator begin to rise again. He puts Rey down, and she says, “Surveillance?”

He nods. “Yeah. Actually… I’m fairly sure there’s someone watching everywhere in the damn ship. I know my room, office, and throne room are clean, and so are all the rooms that touch them, but…”

“Ah.” She looks around, wondering where the camera is, but she can’t get a feel for it. _Don’t want to give them a show?_

He smirks at that. _If I knew for a fact the footage would stay on the ship, maybe I wouldn’t much care, but…_

_Don’t want to see it broadcast across the galaxy?_

_Do you?_ He hits her with the image of them fucking away broadcast on every major news network. He smirks a little. Schiff and Kinear keep trying to make him more “human,” and that might go a long way toward that.

She flashes him an eye roll at that thought, and adds, _Not really._

_At least, not as the way everyone in the galaxy finds out about you?_

_I could live without that._

He grins at her. Then he lifts her hair out of the way, and kisses her neck. _Is it terrible that I kind of like that idea? Everyone knowing you’re mine? Seeing it?_

 _Yes._ But she smiles as she thinks it. Then she gives him a quick, chaste kiss. _How about you just go walk around with me? Maybe hold my hand._

He takes her hand in his. _I can do that._

 

 

* * *

Neither of them thought it would _really_ happen, but both of them knew it _could._ That heartbeat when the doors to the lift opened and the F deck could see them and… Maybe…

But no. Nothing went silent, no one stopped dead in their tracks, with the exception of the three… Rey doesn’t know what they are because she doesn’t know how to read Order uniforms, who don’t really look at them, beyond a quick glance and a sense of annoyance that she and Kylo aren’t moving out of the elevator quickly enough, no one even notices them.

They do step out, and one of the… _Squad Leaders_ , Kylo thinks to her, bumps her shoulder with her own as she moves into the lift, and Kylo, _almost_ tears her a new one for it, but Rey just holds his hand a little tighter.

_Trying to get to work on time. Let her be._

She feels his mental glare.  

_Come on. Popcorn._

_What’s popcorn?_

_Did I not tell you about that?_ She can’t believe that slipped her mind. She pats her dress pockets and finds what she’s looking for, her credit stick. _Come on._ She takes his hand and they begin to weave their way through the crowd. When she and Jon were here it was well-filled, but right now, at what she considers just past supper time, it’s packed. Hordes of people are on the benches, and sitting under the trees, or at the tables. There are lines of people waiting to get into the cafes and restaurants.

 _You know almost five million people means a hell of a lot more when you’re standing in the middle of them._ Kylo thinks to her.

_They sure do. Is that how many…_

_If not today, then by the end of the month. Pretty much everyone who could get here for this will be here for this._

He’s eyeing the crowd, watching his people mill around, talk, joke, eat, play, read, one’s getting a nap under a tree… Just… being people. About half of them are still in their uniforms, and the other half, like him are in their off-duty garb.

He’s thinking about that as someone backs into him, jumps back, apologies on his lips, and goes dead silent as he looks up and sees the scar. Kylo quickly casts, murmuring, “Not him.”

The man, there’s no way to tell his rank, he’s in a faded knit jumper and kilt, says “I’m sorry,” eyes glazed, and drifts away.

 _I think that’s defeating the purpose,_ Rey thinks to him with a wry look.

_Maybe, but it’s better than him wanting to disembowel himself from shame in front of us._

_That’s a point._  She’s looking around. The popcorn guy should be around here somewhere, but… If he is, she can’t see him. Well… There’s a horde of people here, so… she could just… ask for directions. Right?

There’s a couple on a bench a few steps away, he’s sipping a drink, and she’s nibbling on a sandwich, so… Sure. People. People ask other people for directions when they don’t know where they’re going.

Rey takes a step toward them, and says, “Excuse me, do you know where the popcorn vendor is?”

Both of them look at her, and at each other, and she can feel the man is about to shrug, and then the woman sees, really _sees_ who’s standing next to her, and she leaps to attention, dragging the man up with her, his drink spilling as a shocked look spreads over his face, because he can’t fathom why she’s yanking him up, and then he _sees_ who’s standing next to Rey, and every milliliter of color drains out of his face as he scrambles into even straighter posture as both of them stammer in an attempt to find the correct answer.

Rey can hear Kylo laughing in her head, and she can see he’s got a very, tiny, smile on his face. Then he says, “It’s not a command, just a question. I’ve never had popcorn before, and she tells me I should try it.”

They both stand there, at perfect attention, barely breathing.

Rey adds, “It’s okay if you don’t know. I’ve only been down here once, and I’m a little turned around. I think he was around here. With a cart.”

The woman swallows, and then says, “He might not be here. The vendors with the carts move around, and they take shifts off.”

Rey smiles. “Thanks.”

The man’s staring up at Kylo. “Should we… find you popcorn, Master?”

Kylo smiles. The mental image of a horde of his men scouring the _Supremacy_ looking for popcorn making him almost laugh. “I’m enjoying the adventure of finding it myself.” He gestures to the bench they leapt off of. “Relax, finish your meal.”

Both of them sit down slowly, staring at Kylo, as he glances to Rey, and she smiles at them, and they both move on, continuing the search.

 _Is that failing or succeeding?_ she thinks to him.

_I have no bloody idea._

 

 

* * *

When they find the popcorn vendor, he grins at Rey. “Hello, Jon’s pretty friend, I knew you’d be back when I saw you take the first bite.” He’s already grabbing a bag of the salty-sweet for her, not really looking at who’s with her. “Did you bring me a new friend?”

“Yes. I did. He’s got something of a sweet tooth, too.”

The vendor smiles at her, hands over the bag, looks up to her companion, about to say something, probably ask about which of his sweet blends he’d like best, but the words dry up in his mouth and he makes a sound like, “Guk.”

Kylo tries smiling at the man as he takes the bag of popcorn from Rey.

Rey picks a piece out, one with a good amount of chocolate and burnt sugar on it, and Kylo nibbles it from her fingers.

The Popcorn Vendor does not, in fact, have a stroke, but looks like he’s seriously considering it. 

Kylo chews for a moment, not sure if it’s the best thing he’s ever had, maybe if it were dark chocolate instead of this light milk chocolate, maybe a bit saltier, too, but it’s certainly pleasant, and he’ll happily eat his half of the bag, then he smiles at the vendor and Rey, and says to him. “This is good.”

“Mmmrphm…” Comes out of his mouth, but he looks pleased by the compliment.

Rey hands over her credit stick, and that snaps the Vendor into action. “No! Oh, no, my Lady. I couldn’t… Not from…”

She holds the stick out and says, “You most certainly will take payment from me.”

He nods. “I will take payment from you.” And then he pushes her stick into his payment terminal.

A moment later, she and Kylo are walking away, sharing the bag, and he quietly says to her, “Spending some time with Jacen, I see.”

She just looks at him, and then steals the piece of popcorn he was about to eat himself. (Both of them hear a somewhat shocked gasp to the back and left, apparently someone else has noticed who’s walking through the mall.) “I’ll have you know voice control is the first thing I intentionally did with the Force.”

He’s looking at her, curious, not knowing that.

“How did you think I got out of the interrogation room?”

“The same way I would have, slipped the locks. They’re a basic latch design. Move three pieces of metal and out you go.”

She blinks. “I… didn’t think to even try. A Stormtrooper came in, and I used my voice on him. The first try didn’t work, the second one did.”

He nods. “Oh.” Then takes another bite of popcorn, feeling a table of officers staring at them, eyes wide, silent, now, but the whispers begin as soon as they’re behind Kylo’s line of sight. He chews, swallows, and then says, “Probably a good thing I didn’t know that. When I found you were gone, I… got angry and… Uh… If you ever hear the name Darth Tantrum, I _more_ than earned it.”

That gets a raised eyebrow from her. “They have _nicknames_ for you?”

“I don’t know about _they,_ but Hux did. He may have never said it out loud, but I caught it in his head every now and again.”

“And you just… let him…”

He bites his lip. “I was under strict orders to not kill Hux. He was… useful.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sure he had the same orders regarding me.” He takes another bite of the popcorn. “And Phasma for both of us.”

Rey looks around at the mall. More people than she could count in an hour, some of them staring at them, most just milling around doing things. This, here, now, is true.

And this, here, now, was likely true when Snoke was in charge. Maybe not quite so relaxed or comfortable, but this situation didn’t appear in the last year. The vendors and mall and people and… life here… isn’t a feature of Kylo taking over. It’s been here for a while.

It’s almost hard to hold it in her mind.

She can still feel the almost liquid grasp of Snoke’s dark Force. How just being near him made her want to gasp for breath, drowning in pain and anguish. And she looks around, and sees a collection of officers playing what looks like a friendly game of… something… There’s a ball and a court, and they’re throwing the ball around, running all over the place, while their friends yell at them.

Somehow, both of these things were true at once.

Kylo can feel what she’s thinking, and nods. “Yeah. I feel it, too.”

 

 

* * *

As they move through the shops of the F deck, munching the popcorn, Kylo notices that if you happen to be the tall, somewhat quiet guy, in black, next to the beautiful woman, who is smiling, you don’t attract a lot of attention. Yes, if he were in his command blacks, or the mask, they’d all be staring at him and not Rey, but right now he’s, unless they look closely, and yes, some of them do, but most of them just register him as the big black thing next to the pretty woman.

And he doesn’t mind that at all.

The ones that do look, and _see_ him… Some stare. Most leap to attention, going silent or stammering, waiting to see what he might want or need, an edge of fear leaking through their feelings. The thing he says most often as they’re walking is, “At ease.”

But, and he approves of this, there’s only an _edge_ of fear. There was a time when he could walk through the _Finalizer_ and people would literally turn around and re-route their path to avoid getting in his line of sight, hoping they wouldn’t trigger his wrath.

He knows that’s not productive. He’s seen that with his General Staff. People about to wet themselves from fear of making a bad move do not do a good job of… anything. They’re too focused on not getting messily killed for no good reason.

But an edge of fear… That’s better, but… Maybe not ideal… Or…

The thing is, he’s not entirely sure if getting rid of that edge is a good thing or not. He’s not sure if he wants them to be nervous around him. It’s not anything he’s ever had to think about, so he’s got no idea what the right answer is.

He’s about to verbalize the question, ask it out loud, see what Rey thinks about it, when he understands how he was going to ask. _Should a ruler be feared by his subjects?_

It stops him, dead, and she stops, too. (Though she pulls both of them to the side, stopping dead in the middle of the flow of people seems like a bad plan to her. He may be the Master, but most of the people around them aren’t recognizing him, and if they stop dead, they’ll get trampled in the mass of people moving around them.) She knew what he was getting ready to ask. He’s more or less broadcasting his thoughts right now, though she doesn’t think he’s aware of it, much too interested in the thoughts themselves.

 _Subjects._ He thinks it to himself, feeling a lot of the troubles he’s been having with his year-end speech shifting.

 _Not subjects,_ Rey thinks back to him, both of them looking at the throng of people around them.

 _No. Not subjects._ His people are here, for the most part, voluntarily. Yes, it’s probably physically impossible for a large percentage of his Hux grads to leave because of their conditioning, but if they could change their minds about it, nothing would stop them from leaving. And for everyone else… Get planetside, anywhere, and they can go.

He’s not a King, and he’s not an Emperor, and… He’s not sure what the word would be. Even his mother’s beloved senators and presidents claimed the right to rule the unwilling by virtue of having gotten the majority to go along with them. None of them ever cared for the consent of any given individual.

None of the politicians he’s met, heard of, or studied ever cared if any given person wanted to be ruled by him. As long as _enough_ of them did, that was fine.

He can feel that burn through him. He’s not a politician. He _hates_ politicians and politics, not the least because of his mother was one. Lies and half-truths, all kept and spread to get the largest number of people around you to more or less go along with what you were doing at any given time.

And it’s not like there ever really was any grand ideals or noble attachment to a greater good. A Republic voted in a leader his grandfather didn’t like, and Senator Organa rose a rebellion against him. His mother joined it, claimed to be all about _The Republic,_ but _the Senate was still in session_ when she joined the Rebellion. Eventually she tore an Empire down. It fell, a New Republic rose, and as soon as it didn’t go the way she wanted it to go, she and a group of her Rebels peeled off and went their own way again.

She wanted to be a Queen, or a General, he guesses. But she wanted the veil of… what… consent? Agreeableness? A power greater than her moral compass to fall back upon? Maybe? Obviously, when she thought the majority was going the wrong way, she had no trouble leaving it behind.

For a moment, he wishes he could talk to her about that. And he’s fairly sure, eventually, he will. But not right now.

His thoughts are still scattered, whirling around in shards and colors, looking for the thread that’ll lead him to an anchor.

Rey’s holding his hand, drawing them toward a bench to sit down. The people on it catch sight of them while they’re a few steps away and go leaping to attention and more or less sprinting out of the way so the Master and his companion can sit.

Once they’re down, she says to him, and she doesn’t exactly know why, just that this is the right thing to say at this particular second in time, “Tell me about Lando.”

Kylo blinks, feeling a lot of those shards go dropping into place.

“Lando… He’s… Yeah…” Lando had a handful of fancy titles, but the only one that really mattered was CEO of Calrissian Corp. “He started out as a smuggler. A good one. He used to say smuggling is half luck and half skill, and then he’d add something about how he was the luckiest son-of-a-bitch in the galaxy. My dad would say something like, ‘But not the most skilled.’ And Lando would shoot back, ‘It wasn’t my ass that needed rescuing from Jabba’s Palace. Best pilot in the galaxy, all the skill in the world, and you still had the bad luck to get boarded.’ And then Dad would smirk at him. And Mom would say something like, ‘You weren’t exactly in there all by yourself,’ to Lando, and the three of them would laugh about it.”

“He didn’t stay a smuggler, though?”

“No. He made his money, then bet well, and then bet better, like he said, lucky, and won the lease on a gaseous mining colony. He turned that into Cloud City, and then… He just grew it from there. More mining plants, more real estate, more everything. He was Admiral Calrissian, First Senator from Cloud City, CEO of Calrissian Corp when he died.”

That’s got Kylo thinking. Lando didn’t conquer anything. He never _took,_ not by force or by theft. He’d trade and gamble and sweet talk, but he didn’t _take._ He had military forces, but he only used them defensively. He died with an empire, if that’s the word, of more than seventy million people spread out over… Force, something like ninety-three corporations, twenty-five mining outposts, and Cloud City, which by that point was a city in name only because it spread over more than a eighty thousand kilometers. And those were just his on-the-books holdings. Kylo doesn’t know, not for a fact, though he’s absolutely sure in his guts and feelings, that Lando had an entire shadow empire of off-the-books and illegal holdings that his web of contacts could move with and through.

And all of them, every single person in that huge web, was there by choice. Maybe not _good_ choices. He’s sure there were more than a few places where work-for-Lando or be-homeless were the only options available, but he wasn’t kidnapping babies and brainwashing them into being loyal soldiers of the Calrissian Corp.

He can see Lando clearly. It’s an old image. The man’s been dead for almost four years, and the last time Kylo saw him, he was twenty, still Ben Solo, and put in charge of keeping his cousin out of trouble while Lando talked to Luke.

Supposedly, they were just visiting to catch up with old friends and family, but Kylo could feel Lando was sick, and that Luke could help, some. Not enough. Not a cure. But he could slow the cancer down, buy Lando time, and that was enough. But even sick, even as far away from his usual haunts as Luke’s school was, Lando was always… fashionable, and personable, warm, charming… People just _wanted_ to be near him. Half the school had a crush on him before he left, and more than a few of the Padawans (Ben included) were seriously considering adding cloaks to their wardrobes.

Rey’s stroking his hand, and he’s got the sense she’s riding along on his memories, feeling him trying to sort this out.

He can feel the image, the one that’s been guiding him for more than two years now, Lord and Lady Ren, her on his throne, him a bit behind, and for a second it’s achingly, perfectly clear. And then it, too, shatters.

He’s not a King, not an Emperor, and has no want or need to be. He doesn’t want or need a throne, either. A throne is… a way to make the people around you feel small, powerless in your presence. And he doesn’t need it. He’s never needed it.

That image was never really the future… There wasn’t room in his mind for a real image of the future, no way for him to understand where he needed to go, so the Force gave him that one, as a placeholder, because it was one he could understand. That was one that could keep him moving in the right general direction.

But he’s not Snoke. He won’t be a conqueror. And he’s not his mother. He won’t pretend to venerate a political system only to abandon it the second it won’t go his way. He’s neither an Emperor nor Senator, neither of those paths offer him what he needs.

Choice.

He needs people to join him because they want _him_ and what he can do for him.

He needs volunteers, not subjects.

He’s the fucking _Master_ of the Order, and right now, for the first time, he knows exactly what that means.

And for the first time, he can see the future, real, clear, the details crisp, no longer a breath of a messy sketch. The future is a table, long, with many seats, and the people around it are there by their own choice, working together, toward a mutually agreeable goal. Working for and with him, because they want to be part of what he wants to build.

He can see some of the people, clearly. He’s there, Rey, Jon, Kinear and Schiff, Poe, too… Many other seats not yet filled, or shadowed with ghosts of people he’s sure he’s met, but doesn’t yet know how to work with.

He has the sense of ghosts behind him, his parents, Luke, Hux, too, though as a warning or guide, he doesn’t know.

And on the table, at the center, the symbol Jon made for him. The hexagon with Rey’s swirl in the middle. The Order of the Maji.

He feels Rey squeezing his hand, senses her sharply inhaled breath, and knows she’s seeing it, too.

 

 

* * *

They get back to his throne room, though neither of them pay much attention to the walk.

He doesn’t spend much time in here, preferring his office or his room. Pretty much the only time he’s in here these days is when he’s walking through it to go to the training gym or one of the other parts of the _Supremacy._

He wasn’t really looking at it when they left, either. Mostly focused on her, and a glance at the throne, and then focused on the idea of her on the throne and… Then they were in the elevator.

Rey’s really looking around at it now, too. “You know, it’s less black then I was expecting.”

It is, but that’s because Jon’s been decorating it within an inch of its life. “That’s Jon’s doing. Normally it’s all black.”

Jon’s added some… stuff. Drapes, Kylo guesses. Some of them are white with the Order symbol in black on them, some are dark gray with the Order symbol in white. Apparently with black walls, black floors, and a billion kilometers of visible black space beyond the containment field around his throne room, Jon didn’t think he needed black drapes, too. He hasn’t moved the tables and bar in, yet. There’s some sort of dinner the night before the First Year celebration, and there’ll be a reception in here before it. So, before they eat, they’ll be standing around and mingling in here.

Or… well… His throne. They’ll mingle around his throne. It’s in the middle of the room. Tall, high, making sure it’s clear that _he’s_ the reason they’re here. Everyone else stands and mingles. He gets to sit, should he chose.

Kylo nods to the “wall” that’s all sky. “When I took this spot over, it was one of Snoke’s pet general’s rooms. This was his private ship hanger.” He looks at all the drapes, and the carefully laid dark gray carpet runner, and decides that if he leaves the room, opens the hanger bay, and spaces the throne, resulting in everything else in the room also hurtling into the void of space, that Jon will kill him.

He does walk over to it, resting his hands on the back. Like always, the metal is hard, the edges sharp. He doesn’t know where it came from. His vision had a throne in it, so he told them he wanted a throne, and this thing showed up.

A few of his men watched, skittishly, the first time he sat in it. And it was perfectly clear they were all terrified he was going to lash out at them. Fear, a little revulsion, some disgust. A bit of the sense that he wasn’t worthy of throne. So, he sat on the damn thing, and it was horribly uncomfortable, and he did the best he could to look like he belonged on it, and when he took out Hux, he took them out, too.

The one thing that never occurred to him was that the men who bought this damn thing for him never intended him to sit on it long, and that it was likely, intentionally, _not_ fit for him. 

“I’m not an Emperor or a King.” He’s still staring at it. “I’m the Master, and my palace has no need for a throne.”

Rey takes his hand, approving of this, and then lays her other hand on the throne. “You saying you don’t want to play on it?”

He glances away from the throne to her, his mood lightening considerably. “I’m saying _after_ we’ve done everything we can possibly think to do on it tonight, I’m getting rid of it.”

She grins at that. And then kisses him. “So, what do you want to do on it?” She remembers the flood of images he hit her with. “What was your favorite of the bunch?”

He’s smiling widely now, and steps around it, to sit on it. He’d lean against the back, but, really, the damn seat is too long. It’s too fucking long for _him._ If his back is against the back, and he sits with his legs straight out, the edge of the seat hits about four centimeters below the fold of his knees. He’s got no idea who this was designed for. It’s not long enough for Snoke, but if he can’t comfortably sit in it, it’s too damn long for 99.9% of the human population. Maybe there are non-humans who do thrones…

He pats his lap, and she starts to straddle him, but… “Okay… Uh…” She can get one knee next to his thighs, but there’s not quite enough room for both of her legs if she straddles him. She tries resting her knee on the armrest, but it’s hard and sharp, and too high for her to snugly rest on his lap.

 

 

Rey stands up. “Okay, how about…” She sits across his lap, and that’s okay… enough… For a minute. The armrest is now hard and sharp against her back, and the other armrest is digging into her legs, and…

He gets a good grip on her and stands up. “That doesn’t work. Maybe…” He sets her on the throne, kneeling, and he’s standing in front of her, and this way they’re face to face, and he can kiss her without having to bend down, which is pretty nice.

Rey’s hands slip under his jacket, curving around his shoulders, pushing his jacket off. As it falls he gives it an extra toss, sending it behind them. Then her hands are wrapping around his waist, and her lips are warm and soft, and, this is working just fine. He can really kiss her throat and shoulders, his lips gliding along the line of her skin until they hit the collar of her dress. It takes him a moment to figure out how to undo it, but once he’s got it, it’s off of her and dangling off the edge of the throne. Then his lips are against her skin, and she’s got her hands pulling up his shirt, and then stroking his back, and inching toward his butt, and it’s all good except…

 

 

There’s this stupid little foot rest right at the front of it. It’s too narrow to be a decent step up to the throne, in that it’s less than half as long as his feet are, but it’s more than wide enough that he’s sort of bending at the waist and hips to get right up next to Rey, and for a moment or two, that’s fine, but the longer they kiss, the more he’s enjoying her lips on his, and her hands in his pants, and his hands on her breasts, the more he wants to move as well as kiss, the more aware he is of the fact that he’s sort of hunched over, and the part that most wants to rub up against her isn’t in contact with her body.

This time it’s Rey who says, “Yeah, not working, okay… Uh… Maybe…” She pushes him back a little, and steps down, so she’s kneeling in front of the throne, her knees against the little… “What is this thing?”

“The more I think about it, the more I’m coming up with ‘a practical joke’ as an answer.”

She sniggers at that, and then leans a bit further forward, arms on the seat of the chair, and wiggles her butt a him.

Kylo grins at that, kneeling behind her, very happily rubbing up against her. This is actually working pretty well for him. She’s all soft and warm in front of him, and… Force… she’s got the best ass in existence and he can see and touch it, rub up against it. He’s tugging her leggings down, thinking about how rocking back and forth against that soft plush curve is one of his favorite things ever, and once he gets these things down around her knees, his hands can be roaming around her front, one on her pearl, the other… on her breast, or maybe between her lips, or…

 

 

He’s got his fingers under the waistband, and the leggings about two centimeters down when Rey says, “Nope.” Yes, this is working a treat for him, but the throne is cold, and hard, and the step or practical joke, or whatever the fuck that thing is, is digging into her knees, and… It’s really distracting, and not in a good way. He’s doing some things she would really like to enjoy, but all she can think about is if she’s going to have a purple-black line dug into her knees when they’re done, and… “Nope.”

Kylo pulls back, pulling her into his lap, her back to his front. They’re fully on the floor, near the throne now. He licks his lips, gathers her hair in his fist, and then licks her neck. Rey shivers at it, hot wet growing cold fast in the cool air of the throne room. She turns in his embrace, twisting so she can kiss him. A small smirk crosses her lips, and he kisses it.

“You know why it doesn’t work,” she says, pulling his shirt off.

He nods. “I do.”

 

 

For a long moment, he’s kissing her. The throne might not be working, but the floor’s doing just fine for both of them.

But he also knows that the floor, or the throne, isn’t where they need to be. He gets a good grip on her, uses the Force to get him off the floor, and then carries her, like he did in the hotel room on Gidi Prime. Her body flush to his, his arms under her back and legs. He uses the Force to hit the button that opens the door to his office. Sometimes it’s really nice not to be completely dependent on your hands for manipulating the world around you.

In there, he’s got his desk, where he supposes he ‘works,’ if reading a million reports and sending out orders about what to do in regards to those reports is ‘work,’ and the conference table where he and his general staff meet to talk through whatever it is they’re doing.

He hooks his foot in one of the legs of the chair closest to him and pulls it aside, clearing a space, and lays Rey on the table.

She grins up at him. “Better.” It’s still cold and hard, but the edge of the table is rounded, so it’s not digging into either of them, and it’s just high enough that he can lean his pelvis against hers in a really delicious sort of way.

 

 

“Much better.” He leans his hands into the table to the sides of her head, and takes a half step back, and from there he can rock against her at a really sweet angle. His hand finds the small of her back, pulling her just a hair higher, getting just enough friction exactly where both of them want it.

A soft moan whispers out of Rey, then her legs wrap around his hips as she arches against him. “Are you ever going to be able to work here again without thinking about this?”

He grins, kissing her lips, and throat, before stepping back, and pulling her up. “It absolutely would not be the first time I’ve thought about this while working in here.”

“So, what’s your favorite one for in here?” Rey asks, yanking off her breast band.

He grabs both of her ankles and plants her feet on the edge of the table and then rubs against her one last time before stepping back enough to get her leggings all the way off. For a moment, he stands between her legs, gazing at her delta, then looks higher to her belly and breasts, higher yet, to lips and eyes. “You are so ridiculously gorgeous like this.”

She smiles up at him, trailing her toes across his chest and belly, to gently press against where his shaft is trying to get out of his trousers. “Can I see you, too?”

“Oh yeah!” He slowly unbuttons and unzips his trousers, fingers lingering, teasing her with the reveal. He gives himself a bit of a squeeze before pushing his trousers down below his knees.

“Not going to take them off?” Rey asks, leaning up on her elbows.

He’s pulling the chair next to him over. “Don’t want to fight with my boots.”

Once he’s got the chair in front of her, he gets comfortably seated, slides his hands under her butt, and pulls her closer, putting one of her feet on the arm of the chair, the other thigh over his shoulder. “Comfy?” Kylo asks.

 

 

She laughs, a little, smiling at him, feeling giddy and silly and _right._ “Yeah. Are you going to make me better than comfortable?”

He kisses the inside of her knee, and thigh, and then brushes his lips over her delta. “I certainly hope so.”

She lays back, stretching her arms over her head, taking up almost the whole width of the table, wriggling in a content way, hooking her leg around his neck, pulling him a little closer before saying, “Then get to it, _Master Ren._ ”

He moans at that, and she can feel the smile, through their bond, and against her body, as his lips and tongue seek her out.

A long, decadent sound slips out of her mouth as he starts licking. He’s taking his time, going slow and easy, stroking himself in time to what he’s doing with his tongue. Making both of them feel good.

Rey tightens her leg against his back, giving him a little non-verbal _faster_ hint.

Kylo smirks and goes _slower._ Letting his tongue and lips linger and ease over her wet skin. Savoring her flesh against his, her taste on his tongue, and her body thrilling at his.

Rey whimpers at him and he laps that sound up, letting it spark through him. _Good love, so good._

Her hips arch up against him, trying to get him to speed up. Both of his hands close around her hips. _Nope,_ thrums clear from his mind to hers, as his tongue just eases inside of her before gliding back out. _Nice and slow and easy. I want to remember this every time I sit at this table._

“I will fuck you on this table every night this week if you speed up!”

 _You’ll fuck me every night this week if I speed up or not._ He gently presses his tongue to her pearl and just _holds_ it there. Sweet, firm pressure and not a hint of motion. He’s grinning, at least as well as he can with his mouth open, as he does it.

Rey whimpers. “You’re evil.”

 _You knew that going into this._ He doesn’t move his tongue, but he does, lightly, and slowly, so, so slowly purse his lips and give her a very gentle suck. He keeps that up, lips sliding up and back, so slowly, though he does increase the pressure of the suck, making her whole body throb with each pull.

Rey’s hips try to thrust, or squirm, or something, anything to get some friction, but he’s holding her down, good and steady.

“Kylo!”

He sucks just a little harder, presses a little more firmly with his tongue, and just as slowly releases the pressure so the tip of his tongue is just barely touching her pearl, and then he slowly, so slowly presses back down again.

Her hands, thighs, toes, maomao are all clenching, needing more _everything_. She blasts him with a wave of her frustration, of how she _needs_ faster and more.

 _I love how that feels._ If she were less entrenched in her own body, she could feel him reveling in this. Feel the pulse of need echoing through his own skin, feel his hand on his shaft, squeezing hard, keeping himself down, stretching this moment out and out.

As it is she’s narrowing down to the feel of her pearl, all of her attention on it, and his lips around it, and the slow, steady, almost but not quite, just barely enough purse of his lips over her flesh.

“Please! Kylo!”

The _please_ breaks him. Shudders through him, makes him leak. He’s up, over her, hand on his shaft, guiding it into her in one long, deep, _fast,_ hip snapping thrust.

She hisses in pleasure, a fast, exhaled breath, almost pounded out of her by the speed of his thrust, and he groans. Yes, slow was good, but… _fuck_ this is better.

Fast… He’s got his hands on her hips, his legs braced against the table, and uses his hips and knees to get all of his speed and power into this. If she wants fast, he can do fast.

Deep. Fast and deep. He pulls one of her legs over his shoulder, opening her wider, burying himself into her, both of them grunting at the feel of it.

She arches up to meet him, wrapping her leg around his hips, pulling herself onto him, pulling him deeper into her. She groans and he curses at the feel of it, of slick, sweet friction, the growing build of pleasure.

 

 

She reaches between them to rub her pearl. She’s close. Him moving through her, slick and easy and fast is _almost_ enough. The feel of her fingers, fast and hard, gets her to a hair’s breadth away. The look on his face, tense, focused, almost in pain, watching her body taking his, her fingers on her pearl, and the feel of all of it, her body, his, her pleasure, his, _that_ gets her over the edge.

Her body, thrashing and quivering around his, that tosses him over the edge, too.

He spends a moment, leaning over her, hands braced on the table, her legs soft and loose, feet resting on his calves, both of them panting, before becoming aware of the fact that that thing he really likes to do after sex, namely just snuggle right up with her in a boneless heap, is not really an option on his office table.

He’s about to say something like, “I didn’t think this through,” when he notices that she’s pulled them into bed, and a second or two of shifting around has her on top of him, head tucked under his chin against his chest, and both of them in an awfully good mood.

He kisses the top of her head. “If I ever tell you teleporting is overrated, you have my permission and instructions to slap some sense into me with your unlit staff.”

She laughs at that. “I’ll admit, it’s handier than I was expecting it to be.”

He’s laughing now, too. His fingers trail over her back, and she purrs a little.

“So, no more Lord and Lady Ren…” She kisses the bit of chest under her lips.

He strokes her hair. “Not… like that, at least. They’ll likely still call us that, as a sign of respect and status, but… I don’t know what the word is… Corporation, maybe, but… It won’t be an empire, and it won’t be politics, because both of those are about making the people who don’t want to do what you want to do, do it anyway. I don’t care about the ones who don’t want us. They can go do whatever the hell it is they want to do, and as long as they leave us be, we’ll leave them be, and…”

Rey shifts a little, propping up so she can look him in the eyes. His eyes are warm, expression happy, bright.

“We’re going to build it for the people who want us, Rey. They’re going to come to us, and maybe we can’t give them a better galaxy, taking over the whole galaxy is overrated, but we can give them the chance at a better life, and…”

“And that’s all anyone needs, Kylo. Just the chance.”

He nods, kissing her lips. “Yeah.”

 

 

* * *

If it weren’t for the fact that Lord Ren and a… friend… were seen strolling about the F deck, munching popcorn of all things, the fact that the janitorial staff found the throne room and office littered with clothing would have been _hot_ gossip.

But, well… The Master and his companion, (Lady? Mistress? Given that said clothing was found all over the throne room and office, they’re obvious _good_ friends.) were seen out and about thoroughly overshadowed the clothing in the throne room.

After all, the rumor that the Master has a Mistress is old.

The rumor that both of them, went out, together, in public, is new.

So, yes, there were some giggles about what they did after roaming about, but the fact that they were out, (The Master _never_ goes out.) what they were wearing, (Apparently the Master has informal clothing, though it’s black. His lady was in pretty, bright, casual clothing.) that they spent a while talking about… Lando Calrissian of all people (There are a lot of ideas as to why, but none of them are right.) that the Master likes his popcorn with chocolate and burnt sugar, that his lady hand fed him some and _stole a piece from him_ , without him even blinking, that… They appeared to be… on a date… The Master… Goes on dates (or at least _a_ date)… With a woman (Who? No one knows. Though speculation is _rife_. Everyone who saw Rey thinks she looks like _someone._ A particularly famous holo-novella star is the current winning contender for the Master’s Companion.)… And walks around, holding her hand, being… cute and affectionate. (Since the last time the majority of the Order saw the Master, he was cutting the head off a rival General, the idea that he does things like wander about hand in hand with his lady sharing popcorn is just… beyond belief to most of the people who didn’t see it personally, and pretty stunning for the ones who did.)

The Officer class is buzzing with gossip, and more than a few heads on the verge of exploding.

And Kinear, when he gets the story, three days later, settles back and smiles. It’s about time this Empire had an Empress, and he’s beyond pleased to see that the Master is starting to show her, and himself with her, around.


	58. The Master of the Court of Ren

12/25/1 

 

Jon does not, in fact, whimper, when Kylo, too bright and too early tells him that he wants to get rid of the throne.

Granted, he doesn’t so much tell Jon, as Jon is in the throne room, triple checking his design against the physical layout of the room, when he notices four men, who this time last year would have been in Stormtrooper gear, but are now, like anyone else not actively fighting, in cloth uniforms that allow their faces to be seen, _and_ have their names on their right arms, manhandle the throne out of Kylo’s… what is rapidly becoming not a throne room, lifting the throne, putting it on a hovcart and— “Whoa! Stop that! What are you doing?”

“Getting rid of the throne. We’ve got orders.” The… he assumes team leader, though they all appear to have the same rank, says.

Jon’s eyes are bugging out of his head. The throne is the central focus of the room. It’s the piece pulling all of this together. It’s where everyone will circle and mingle and his very carefully designed schematic to make sure that the maximum number of people who matter, who may want to ally themselves with the Order, or take advantage of any services it offers, get to see, literally _see_ the man who runs this thing, without having to put said man through yet another round of a receiving line, the last one of which he went through looking like he’d have more fun in the medbay having one of the droids extracting impacted toenails, and some fucking dingbat has ordered the throne removed?

He can already feel everything in his head tense up and start to whimper.

 

 

“Whose orders?”

Because he’s an officer, and an annoyed one, and these are, based on the numbers on their name tags, Hux-method grads, they don’t disrespect him, but the confusion of having one officer being annoyed at the orders of another one is clearly painful to them.

“Captain Rennik, in physical plant, gave us this job.” FN-9483 replies.

“Here, sir.” QR-9987 hands over a chit, and Jon inserts it into his datapad, and there it is, a work order.

Jon reads it, and scowls, the fucking thing is not only in order, but C8’s name is on it, so it can have only come from one place. The fucking dingbat in question is apparently Ren himself. He shoves the order back at QR, while muttering under his breath about inconsiderate divas, and turning to storm toward Kylo’s office.

He knows the code on the door and puts it in, waits a second for it to open, and then marches straight in.

Ren looks up from his meeting with… Jon doesn’t know or care. “Out!”

The men he’s meeting with, none of them with a rank below General all bristle at a mere Lt. Colonel attempting to order them around, but Jon doesn’t care. “None of you are deaf, out, now!”

Ren raises an eyebrow, smirks, and nods. “Commanders, this can wait. I’ll reconvene us soon.”

Jon waits for the stunned commanders to clean up their gear and shuffle out of Kylo’s office.

“You’re upset,” Kylo says, as soon as they’re gone.

“No shit! You asked me to do the impossible, and I’m doing it. Then you piled more on me on top of that, and I’m doing that, too. Now you’re fucking with my design so that I’ve got even _more_ shit to do! Do I have a big sign on my ass that says ‘kick me?’ What the fuck would make you think _getting rid of the throne_ less than a week before everyone in the galaxy who matters and could be convinced to come here arrives was a good plan? On top of that, what would make you think that tossing it without ask—consulting with me first is smart?”

Kylo’s mouth opens and closes and he just blinks a few times before saying, “Shit. I’m… Sorry. The idea that it mattered never occurred to me.”

“Well, it fucking does matter! You hate receiving lines, so I bent over backwards to set this up so you didn’t have to go through one and that throne was the cornerstone of the plan. You could be there, they’d come to you, and instead of having to gladhand every asshole in the galaxy, you could keep some distance, but they could still see and maybe talk a little with you. What the fuck were you thinking?”

Kylo blinks again and then says, “That I’m not a king or an emperor or…”

Panic races down Jon’s spine. He knows that Kylo’s a bit nervous about this whole thing, but having to talk him off a ledge wasn’t anything Jon thought he was signing up to do. But if he’s got, to… “Kylo, shit, man, no! You are _the Emperor_. Now is not the time to be getting cold feet about this. You do not get to just flake out on me at the last minute…”

 

 

* * *

Kylo’s gritting his teeth, and desperately wishing that Rey was here, because she’d likely be good at calming Jon down, and he’s just not. And worse, Jon is upset, at him, flooding him with angry and frustrated and tense feelings, and they just feed into Kylo, making him feel upset, angry, and frustrated and he can literally feel it happening, Jon’s dark feeding his, and he’ll push those feelings back to Jon, and it’s this horrible positive feedback cycle, and he’s not sure how to shut it down, just that he needs to and—

And Jon’s working on the pep talk of all pep talks, images of everything falling apart as Kylo runs off and vanishes to wherever it is he dwells with Rey, wondering if he’s got to call in Kinear, and if this thing can be saved, and… “You can’t just quit, Kylo! All of it depends—“

Kylo makes himself take a deep breath, makes his body stop the adrenaline that’s spiking his heart rate, and making his fingers twitch, and tries to think of something calm, which isn’t exactly his strong suit, but… in the bath, laying there, floating in the water. Okay, that helps some. At home, having dinner, curled up on the chair, reading, smelling Rey’s hair… Calm… Quiet… One more breath, and another. Finally Kylo says, “I’m not quitting. I’m clarifying.”

“Clarifying? Tossing out the throne is _clarifying_?” Jon doesn’t have the level of emotional control Kylo does, because he’s still in the midst of trying to not think about what the hell he’s going to do if the Order falls apart, and “clarifying” is not doing it for him.

“Yes. We’re getting rid of the throne,” Kylo replies, and he feels like this is probably inappropriate, but he doesn’t know how else to do this without ending up in a big, stupid fight, so he uses some mild voice compulsion to go with ‘getting rid of the throne.’ Not so much that Jon goes blank and stupid, but enough that he stops loathing the idea enough to listen to him. “You remember saying to me, ‘Master, what’s that? A teacher?”

Jon squints his eyes, thinking back. “Something like that.”

“Well, yes, it is. And I’m going to teach the whole galaxy a new way to do this.”

“Okay, _Master_.” Jon scowls in the direction of the huge hole in the center of what had been a very carefully thought out décor scheme specifically designed for maximum visibility and traffic flow. “Care to tell me, the man who’s supposed to be executing this stuff and making it happen, what’s up?”

“Yes,” Ren gestures to the table. “Do you want a drink or something?”

Jon normally doesn’t drink on duty, but thinking about the ruins of his plan, he’s game. “What do you have?”

“Coffee, water…” Kylo sees Jon slump, this is apparently not what he was thinking of as a drink. “Uh… C8?”

The droid, who had been impassively watching all of this says, “I can access any liquid on the rotation of the main kitchens.”

Jon shakes his head. “The only thing I might want right now is a vodka.”

“I can get that, too.”

Jon sits, rubbing his temples. “Rye or wheat, not potato, really not orflan, double shot, -2 degrees, in a frozen glass.” He looks at Kylo, who’s blinking slightly at the idea of a vodka order that’s _that_ specific. “This better be good.”

“I think it is.” Ren’s a few minutes into explaining his idea, the clarifying vision he had with Rey, and how his idea of a palace, and a Master is shifting, how he doesn’t need the throne, doesn’t need to project his power by being literally above everyone around him, or the only one in the room allowed to sit.

That kind of… theater… isn’t good for the sort of mood, of people working together, that he wants to project. His power will come from people joining him, people working with him because they want to, and for that to happen he’s got to be in and with and around people. How his seat of power will be a… board room for lack of a better term. How he’ll trade value for value, work with the people who want him, and leave the others in the dust.

By the time he’s done, Jon’s shot back the vodka, loosened his collar, and developed something a bright flush to his cheeks.

C8, apparently having decided that this might be a conversation that flows better with alcohol, left the bottle, and Jon appears to be seriously debating another. He does pour some into a glass and slides it to Kylo, who eyes it, but doesn’t drink any. He can tell by the smell that this is more alcohol than he wants before lunch, or at any other time of the day, unless it’s diluted in a pitcher of something he actually likes the taste of.

“There’s a saying on Coruscant, that only drunks and children are ever truly honest.” Jon takes another shot, waiting a few breaths, feeling his brain and muscles loosening in response to the alcohol. “I’m too old to pass for a child, so here goes. You don’t work a room well enough to do what you want to do with this.

 

 

“That’s part of why the damn throne was smack dab in the middle of the room. It would give you something of a buffer. You _hated_ being in the receiving line, and broke a man’s hand doing it the first time. Now you’re dropping a plan in my lap based entirely on your ability to make connections with strangers, while, at the same time, taking Rey, who is nervous about this to begin with, out in public, for the first time. Did I do something to piss you off? Seriously, _why_ would you do this to me?”

With the alcohol in his system, Jon’s control is lower, and his emotions are sloshing all over the place, so Kylo can feel he’s distressed about this, but not just _this._ Sussing out the extra layer of what’s going on with Jon helps.

“Your mother gets here tomorrow, doesn’t she?”

“Shit, don’t remind me.” He rubs his forehead. “As soon as she sees that hole in the center of the room, she’ll be on me, lecturing me about how to design a proper party and acting like I’m the idiot who never learned the first lesson of keeping a crowd moving.”

“Ah…” Mortal terror at failure in front of a disappointed parent. Kylo can certainly understand that. “If you tell her it’s my idea?”

“She’ll smack me upside the back of the head. A good wedding planner will often have a difficult bride, and a worse mother of the bride, and it’s the planner’s job to not just make sure that everything is perfect, but to also make sure that everyone on the bride’s side thinks they got what they wanted, especially if what they actually wanted was a terrible idea.”

That’s more insight into what Jon thinks he’s doing than Kylo had ever imagined, and he’s not entirely sure how well that speaks of him as the ‘bride,’ but... Later, that’s for later.

“Is what I want a terrible idea?”

Jon stares at Kylo, and sags a little in his seat. Then he looks at the bottle, but doesn’t take another drink. “Long term, no. And, yes, I’m familiar with the idea of start as you intend to go. And yes, I know this is your first, real exposure to the parts of the galaxy that matter. Last year they either didn’t come or sent their backup players. So,” he grits his teeth, “doing it now isn’t insane, but…

“Kylo, _five hundred_ people will be at this reception.”

Kylo blinks. “Weren’t there two thousand last year?”

“Yes, but only one hundred and fifty of them got to meet you, on top of that, these people _matter._ When they give reports, their leaders will _listen._ There’ll be more than ten thousand at the different later festivities and speech, but these are the ones we really want to see you and get the idea that they want and need to work with you. Can you actually stand for that long, in a receiving line, making polite conversation, _gently_ shaking hands, and being _pleasant_ , without projecting to anyone, not everyone, but _anyone,_ nearby that you’re only doing it because someone is holding you at blaster point?”

Kylo takes the time to really think about that.  And he’s not exactly enjoying the idea of it, but… It’s getting better. Rey will be there, and this is starting to shape things into the Order of the Maji, shape them into where he’s really supposed to go, so… “It’s important, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll do it.”

Jon slumps against his chair. “I still have to reorganize the layout and traffic flow. A receiving line takes care of one of the problems and opens more of them.”

“I’m sorry.” Kylo pulls off his glove and gently takes Jon’s hand in his. Then he focuses on the image of what he’d seen talking with Rey. He lets it seep into Jon’s mind.

Jon shuts his eyes and nods, resigned. It looks like a good goal. He likes it, but… now? “Maybe, next time you could hold on the major regime-shifting epiphanies until _after_ the massive party everyone and their cousin is coming to?”

Kylo snorts a laugh at that. “If the Force ever deigns to care about holding out on the epiphanies for convenient times, I will, too.”

Jon doesn’t glare, but the snark is very sharp in his gaze. “So, that’s how it’s going to be? You toss something insane on me and it’s _the Force?_ ”

“I could blame it on Rey. Or you. Apparently, you two got nattering with each other, and next thing I know I’ve got a costume and am wandering about with a bag of popcorn having epiphanies.”

Jon snerks at that, then rolls his eyes. “Fine. How’d it go?”

Kylo smiles, a little. “Well, it was good _for me_. There were some very surprised officers out there.”

“I’ll bet. I caught a few whispers of it out and about, apparently people are shocked to see you do things like eat or walk around with a lady friend.”

Kylo rolls his eyes at that. “Most people didn’t notice me as anything other than the big guy next to Rey.”

“Just the way you like it.”

“I certainly didn’t mind.”

Jon sighs. “Plans like yours work significantly better when you genuinely enjoy people, you know?”

Kylo shrugs at that. “It feels right.”

“What’s Rey think about this?”

“She thinks it’s moving in the right direction.”

“Yeah, but does she have any idea what she’s signing on to do to get it there?”

That makes Kylo feel cold. “I don’t know.”

“Great.” One more sigh. “I should get going.” Jon pushes himself up, overbalances, and ends up right back on his butt again.

“Alcohol hits you hard, doesn’t it?”

“It does when I’m working on six doses of stim and five hours of sleep in two days.”

Kylo hadn’t realized Jon was stretched _that_ thin on this. He takes Jon’s hand, pulls him up, and then wraps an arm around him, before walking him toward his room.

“Wrong direction.”

“Your rooms are far away. Mine isn’t. Get a nap. And then when you wake up, I’m introducing you to Ellie Kinear, and if I’m right, she’ll be able to give you a hand you need.”

“Ellie… Wait… Lady General Kinear?”

“Yes. And if I can get him here, the droid I was telling you about.”

Jon rolls his eyes, but lets Kylo walk him to his bed, and deposits him there. “At least three hours sleeping, five is better. Rest.”

Another eye roll followed by, “Yes, sir.”

 

 

* * *

Getting Ellie Kinear on board for this took about half an hour of research on C8’s part, locating Ellie Kinear, another hour of waiting for her, and then forty-five seconds of explanation, and a tiny bit of puppy eyes from Kylo.

Apparently, back in the day, she used to do a lot of this sort of thing, because back in the day, getting from being a mid-level officer to a top level officer took a lot more than just being good at your job. Back in the day, both Kinears were working _very_ hard at getting Captain Kinear to Major, to Lt. Colonel, to Colonel, to General.

And while Pat took care of combat maneuvers, and fighting on actual battlefields, Ellie had his back, playing the political game, and making sure the right people knew what her husband was up to, and took a vivid interest in him.

And, on top of that, she’s tutting at the idea of ‘that poor thing’ (Jon, Kylo assumes) working himself ‘half to death’ because he doesn’t have the right people to delegate to. (He’s got the sense that as of ten minutes from now, a small brigade of women, all with gray hair and sharp eyes, are going to descend on wherever it is they like to meet up, and start getting this under control.)

(What Jon’s going to think of this, Kylo doesn’t know, but he’s getting the other side of the game into play, so he doesn’t spend too long contemplating it.)

 

 

* * *

Getting Threepio into the mix… That’s a trickier subject.

Part of it is he’s not entirely sure parties are Threepio’s thing. But… okay. Kylo’s not much for working a room. He doesn’t really enjoy mingling with strangers. Pleasant, vapid conversation isn’t his strong suit.

Fine, all of that’s true.

But, just possibly, if he could talk a droid who likely knows everyone coming to this thing, or who they represent, into providing a quick paragraph or something on each of them, so he’s not exactly jumping naked into the abyss, that could be a good thing.

If…

Rey’s a billion kilometers away, at least, as Kylo’s dithering about starting this, but apparently it’s enough of a shadow on his mind that she feels it.

_You want me to talk to him?_

That’s an idea that hadn’t occurred to him. Maybe, he, personally, doesn’t have to do this. _Do you have time?_

_In an hour or so._

_Do you_ want _to?_ he asks.

There’s quiet on Rey’s end of the connection for a few moments, followed by… _I think I should._

He focuses on her, getting a feel for what’s in her mind, and the sense that this isn’t exactly comfortable, but if doing this _matters_ , if they’re moving forward together, then she should be helping. It’s a bright and steady light in her mind right now, and he flushes at it, feeling warm and happy all over.

A moment later, he feels her smile.

 _I’ve got the teacher programs._ He thinks to her. _They’ll be uploaded into whatever droid body you think will work best._

_Something with more mobility that Threepio has._

Kylo nods, and then feels silly, because he’s sitting at his desk, alone, holding a few teacher program disks. _Yes. He’s not built for mud._

She’s standing next to him, hand resting on his shoulder, as she bends and kisses his forehead head. “Or snow. Give me the programs. Let’s see if any of them pass muster.”

 

 

“I hope.” He hands the disks over, giving her a bit of a squeeze.

She squeezes his hand. “Okay, I’ve got to get back.”

“What are you doing?”

“Well, _someone_ taught a few of them to make cookies, and now _all_ of them want to learn how to bake, so we’re learning how to do that. When I left, we were just measuring out all of the dry ingredients. Last time we measured according to the recipe. This time we’re all doing it slightly differently, and we’re going to see how it works out.”

Kylo smiles up at her, and she kisses his smile before porting back to the group kitchen.  

 

 

* * *

Threepio eyes the disks in his hand. Then he looks to Rey. “No bodies?”

“Not yet. We’re not entirely sure what the best setup would be.”

“In my opinion, children learn best with a teacher who looks at least vaguely like them.”

“Some sort of bipedal, at least somewhat humanoid droid with a face?”

“Yes.” He glances out of his window. What used to be kilometers of stubbly, wet, windblown brown are now white. And with the white/gray clouds pouring down more snow, the view outside his window is more nothing than anyone who’s never seen Hoth could imagine. “Preferably something that handles snow better than I do.”

“And mud. Kylo’s got training droids that move like humans. We might go with one of them. There’s nothing on this planet they can’t move around or through.”

“Ah.” Threepio says, again looking at the disks. “So, is he not here because he can’t be bothered, or because he thinks you talking to me works better?”

“I thought me talking to you might work better,” Rey says. “Am I wrong?”

Threepio can’t shrug, but he can tilt his head in a way that suggests a shrug. “It’s a bizarre sensation. I cannot, at this time, find a fault in what Master Ren is attempting to do. Rationally, his plans for The Order are fine, possibly laudable even. But I still… hate,” she’s never heard that much fire in Threepio’s voice, “what he did to people I adored. I… feel afraid at the idea of him too close to me. He’s fried my sensors before, and while I am not human, nor can I physically feel, everything going black and silent is terrifying.”

Rey nods. “If you don’t want to. You don’t have to. No one’s forcing anyone to join or work with the Order.”

“I know. But that would be the point. That was the point of what we fought for. The idea that people get to decide for themselves. That no one should ever be enslaved or conquered… And… If I do not work toward that because I have a bad history with the person doing it, what does that say about me?”

Rey half-smiles. “That you’re human?”

“We’re I to be human, I’d prefer to not be emulating your weaknesses.”

Rey shrugs at that. “I’d imagine a lot of us would rather be more rational about things like this, too. You’ve always got a home here, and you can teach, or not, as you see fit.”

“Or…” Threepio says. “You’re here with these disk now because there’s an ‘or’ waiting.”

“Or… The First Year celebration is up, and more than five hundred people will be coming for a close gathering, and Kylo’s sure you know all of them, or who they report to, and a bit of intel on all of them would be worth its weight in gold.”

“Ah…” Threepio sounds non-comittal, but Rey can… feel, though she supposes she shouldn’t be able to, not on something that isn’t alive… though… Unifying Force is supposed to be in and of and through all things, not just living things, so… She shoves that aside for later contemplation. A good question to open up to her students.

Anyway, it’s clear that being _useful_ and useful in the way he was designed to be, is sparking some interest for Threepio. It’s been almost a year since he’s had any diplomatic work, and the chance to do it is something he desires.

He takes the disks. “I still want to meet the man I’m supposed to work with.”

Rey nods. “Feel like taking a trip?”

“Where?”

“To the _Supremacy_ to meet him.”

Threepio can’t take a calming, deep breath. He can’t take a moment to physically steel himself for something. None of those are available to him, but Rey would absolutely tell you that’s what he did.

“Yes.”

“Good. This evening?”

Threepio nods. “This evening.”

 

 

* * *

Jon wakes up with his head muzzy and his mouth tasting brown. He blinks a few times, steeling himself for sitting up, but once he does the expected headache and wave of nausea don’t hit. He’s not hungover, just _tired._

“You’re up, good.”

He blinks and jerks a little, looking at the little, old woman with the white hair and very blue eyes sitting at the table, a collection of… from the looks of it, his plans, all around her. He blinks again, wanting to rub his eyes, half afraid that he must look a sight, and partially horrified to see someone else going through his rough drafts.

She nods at him. “This is good work. You certainly know what you’re doing with this.” Then she sighs. “But just because you know what you’re doing doesn’t mean the people you work for do.” Her smile is gentle, and she stands up, walking, slowly, with a little shuffle to her step, to the side of Kylo’s bed. “I’m Ellie Kinear, and apparently Kylo finally decided that you needed help.”

 

 

Jon blinks one last time, and then says, “You call him Kylo?”

Ellie grins. “One of the wonderful things about being an old woman, and I’ll tell you, wonderful things about being old are few and far between, is that I get to pretty much do whatever I like, including calling, in private, the Master by his first name.”

Jon nods. “Yes, Ma’am.”

“Oh, stop that. Call me Ellie. We’re on the same team in this game, so let’s get to work. Take a few minutes, wake up for real, and then let’s get to it. Our boy just ripped a hole in the middle of your plan, and we’ve got to rebuild it.”

Jon rubs his face, and then gets up, heading for the refresher, devoutly hoping that when they redid the soundproofing between Kylo's room and office, they also made sure the soundproofing between the refresher and the room were good, and then, in a few moments, gets himself ready to work.

When he returns to the table, he sees his plans, his layouts, his sketches, and a jug of some sort of tea, a collection of sandwiches, and a bowl of fruit. “Eat. Food always helps the brain think.”

He takes one of the sandwiches, and begins to chew. His body is telling him it’s got to be close to evening, and a glance at the chronometer shows him he’s close to right. Which means he hasn’t fed himself since breakfast.

Ellie’s looking at his final draft. “I see drapes. I see food and drinks. I see places for people to mingle in the open, and little nooks to mingle privately. I assume you have them wired for sound?”

He nods, chewing. “Of course.”

“Good boy. Video?” Her eyes are sharp as they flit about from detail to detail of his schematic for the party.

“Every angle.” Which isn’t strictly true. He did leave a few blind corners for himself. He’s also sure that no one else needs to know that or what he hopes to get up to in them. Never let it be said that Jon Frakes didn't know how to party when a party presented itself, let alone one he designed the floor plan for.

“Even better. Do you have spies in place?”

“Not my department. I’m not even sure who to give the feed to, just sure that we need it.”

“Okay.” She smiles at him, and he can see that under her little old lady exterior there’s a spine of steal and a will to match. “So you’ve got all the basics covered. What’s the food?”

“Nibbles. Little things that are easy to eat with your fingers, won’t drip, or spatter, and just a touch saltier than they need to be to encourage people to drink.”

“Someone trained you well.” She pauses for a moment, looking at him, really looking, and then says, “Frakes.”

Jon nods. “Yes. And yes, she is.”

Ellie's lips curl into an amused smile. “Someone indeed. I haven’t seen your mum in… it’s got to be getting onto thirty-six years now.”

“Were you a client of hers?”

The flavor of Ellie's smile changes, it’s almost bashful, but he can see some sort of calculation under it. “I never rose that high. But I knew women who were, and I was often… around… when your mum was.”

“Being… helpful?”

Ellie smiles at that, too. “A well-connected bride often has a good friend around to provide an extra set of eyes, or opinions, and sometimes, a high lady of great status, but maybe not a bride,” Jon takes that to mean that she was one of the hand-matrons of the Emperor’s Mistress, “needs a friend who’s just a hair outside of the ins and outs of court politics to keep an eye on her interests.”

“Ah.” Jon knows what happened to three of the four of the Emperor’s Mistresses, and the fourth one died on the second Death Star.

He’s got a serious look on his face, and Ellie pokes him with her elbow, a huge grin on her face. “None of that, Lad. Selina Beau and I went way, way back. If she’d been a boy, my parents would have tried to make a marriage with her instead of Pat, but she wasn’t, and in time Palpatine laid eyes on her, and the rest was history. Until, of course, he laid eyes on someone else.”

Selina Beau was the third of four. And, if memory serves, when she fell from grace, she ‘vanished’ along with most of her favorites. Judging by the look on Ellie’s face, Beau probably survived her fall from favor. “And… that was the last time you saw my mum?”

“It seemed a politic time to get off of Coruscant and join Pat at his command.”

Jon can imagine that being an intimate of the Emperor’s ex-mistress wasn’t a good thing to be when the new-mistress was setting up her court.

Ellie taps his schematic. “You’ve got eight different drink stations, eight for food, set so traffic can flow through the room, moving from one to the next without any back-ups.”

"Serving droids will be circling with drinks and nibbles, too."

"Good." She taps the middle. “And that’s where the would-be Emperor Ren should be sitting, the star this solar system is supposed to be orbiting around, except we can’t exactly convince him to be an Emperor, so now we’ve got to rebuild.”

“In a nutshell.” He nods to the doorway. “I can plant him here, keep him and Rey, and you and the General, and likely Admiral Schiff and his wife here, greet people as they enter. Dinner’s on the _Finalizer_ , so if I keep people moving in slowly enough, you six can run the door, and then when the last one is in, we’ll give it half an hour, so everyone gets drinking and mingling time, and then we’ll dock the _Finalizer_ , seal it tight, open the airlock, and then move people to the dining room. Dinnertime, we’re cruising around, with a view of the _Supremacy_ and the ships around her, which will be doing maneuvers, and then from there, at the end of the night, we’ll re-dock at the main loading bay, and escort people to their rooms.”

“So, you’ve got ninety percent of this set.”

“Yeah, I’ve just got to keep them from forming a clot around the receiving line.”

“Food and drink helps.”

“It certainly does, but… If he’d been in the middle, there’d be a reason to draw people further into the room.”

Ellie nods. She looks at the sketch. “No flowers?”

Jon rubs his forehead. “No silk ones on hand, and real ones are frightfully expensive in space, and we’ve got to get everything else ready for everyone to stay here, so…”

“So you’ve budgeted every credit you could, and then some, and you can’t take another expense.”

“Exactly.”

Ellie looks around Kylo’s room. Black, everything is black, then she thinks about what Kylo wore to the last of these. “Did you pay for Kylo’s clothing?”

“No. I made it, and most of the fabric was donated.”

“And his lady’s?”

“Same.”

She looks out to the stars around them. “I have three florists, and I’m sure your mother has at least three more, all of whom would likely be willing to donate an installation as long as they could put their mark on it. Last minute notice isn’t ideal, but,” she taps the center of the room, along with all four corners. “If we have a fountain in the center, along with water flowers, and then smaller installation in the corners, that will give people something to look at and gather around.”

Jon nods. “That would, but I’m not kidding about money being tight. I can afford to pay basically _nothing_ for this. I can likely grab people to pick them up, so they don’t have the cost of delivery, but that’s it.”

“Let me take care of that. You just print up some extra tickets to this do and make sure some nice rooms are ready. We have more of them than we need, correct?”

He nods. “That we’ve got. We’ve got quarters for 800,000 on the F deck alone, and nowhere near that many officers. Getting an extra dozen rooms into play won’t be difficult.”

“Do it. I’ll make sure we’ve got something interesting to look at.”

“Thank you!” Jon looks, and is starting to feel, a bit relieved.

Ellie sits back, and says to Jon, “If what Pat’s telling me is true, this isn’t exactly your job, is it?”

Jon shrugs. “It is today.”

“Okay. You know the Emperor had a mistress; do you know what she did?”

Jon smirks a little.

“Beyond that.” Ellie says, voice sharp.

“No.”

“Her job, her full time, every day, _job_ , was making sure anything the Emperor touched looked right. It was a full time job that involved a full time staff. She had more than eighty people who did nothing but keep everything looking right. It wasn’t something flogged off onto someone who had fifty other things on his plate. It’s a million little things, and when it’s done wrong, it’s garishly visible, and everyone notices and talks. When it’s done right, it’s practically invisible. The idea that someone does all of this is not apparent to most people. That said, you either need to find someone to delegate this to, or find someone to take the rest of your jobs, because _everything_ he’s got you trying to do is too much.”

Jon sighs. “I know.”

“Tell me about his Lady. I haven’t met her, yet. Is this the sort of thing she could do?”

Jon doesn’t laugh. “Tell me, Lady Kinear, do you have any interest in a job like this?”

“That bad?” Ellie says.

“I’d sooner put him in charge of decorating this stuff. I have the feeling that he’s, at least once, _seen_ what this sort of thing should look like.”

Ellie doesn’t wince. Intentionally. “How much help is she going to need?”

“A _lot._ ”

“No mother?”

“No. Orphaned at a young age.”

“Is she pretty? Pretty enough will get a woman a lot of forgiveness.”

Jon shrugs. “She’s physically very attractive, has a good smile and a warm personality, but skittish and worried about making Kylo look bad. She’ll look amazing in the dress we’re making, assuming she doesn’t get overwhelmed by all of it and crumple into a crying ball.”

“Ah… Well… It wouldn’t be the first time a skittish bride had be to coaxed into shining.”

Jon smirks at that. “No, but it might be the first time said bride was dangerous enough to have carved a scar into her man’s face as… I don’t know why she did it… An introduction or something. Neither of them has been willing to tell me the full story of how they met, yet.”

Ellie blinks at that. The idea that Kylo’s woman would be a warrior as well shouldn’t be a surprise to her. The idea that _she's_ the one who put that scar on his face is... intriguing. What they can do with that... “Oh my. Well… Flowers…” She smiles brightly. “Yes, lots of flowers. Many rare and pretty flowers. Make sure we’ve got something beautiful, expensive, and succulent to attract attention.”

Jon nods. “Yes, please.”

Ellie pats his hand. “I’ll go work on that. You go… get our bride ready for her grand reveal.”

He sighs a little at that.

“And give your mum my regards.”

“I will.”

 

 

* * *

An hour later, Ellie Kinear will say to her husband, “Diplomats. Shake them down, find the ones who’ve scattered, beg, borrow, steal, or bribe them into play. He’s a designer, likely a good one, but he’s not a diplomat, and he needs help, a lot of it.”

Pat nods. “Most of the ones I know have been retired for more than three decades.”

“Shake the tree anyway. I will, too. If they’re out of the game, they’ll know who’s in it. But this boy’s on the verge of burnout and worse, being promoted way above what he can handle. He’ll be a brilliant set of eyes for Kylo, and he’s got the touch for making things look good, for seeing a bigger picture, but he’s not the man to actually do the job.”

“An architect, not a builder.”

“Exactly. Find him some builders.”

“Yes, dear.” And Pat gives his wife a gentle kiss.

 

 

* * *

Kylo heads in after Ellie leaves, and says to Jon, who’s sitting at his table, looking over his sketches, “Better?”

“Probably.”

“Good. Rey and Threepio should be here, soon.” Kylo sits next to him, rolling his neck a bit.

Jon nods, absently. “Kylo… I have a feeling that, you wanting to be an Emperor or not, Rey’s going to be an Empress, with a court and… Uh… Does she have any idea what you’re setting her up to do?”

Kylo winces again, this being the second time this has been pointed out to him. “Probably not.” Because, among other things, Kylo also doesn’t know. “But… No. She’s the Mistress of the Maji, and doing that, and… if there’s someone who holds court and… does stuff like that…” Because Kylo’s beyond _vague_ about what constitutes “stuff like that.” “Could that be you?”

Jon blinks, very surprised at that. “Uh…”

“Look, you’re good at it. It pretty much covers the sort of thing I need you to do anyway. I know Rey’s got no interest in it, and… I mean, there’s not a law saying my wife _has_ to do these things, right?”

Jon shrugs, still reeling from this idea. “You make the laws, so… no?”

“So…”

Jon blinks and thinks his way through it. Traditionally the Empress, or Emperor’s Mistress… Takes care of the look of things, entertains, makes sure everything facing the rest of the galaxy works smoothly, and… that’s actually pretty close to what he’s seeing as his job so… “I could do that.”

“Good. Set up your court however you like it.” Kylo’s looking very relieved at the idea of being able to just dump this onto Jon, which even Jon can read off his face.

He’s also sure that Kylo’s got no idea how much power he’s about to fob off onto him.

Another thought hits when that does. That power… there’s a reason why it normally lies in the hands of the Emperor’s mate. “They’ll talk.”

Kylo shrugs. “They talk anyway.”

Jon stares at him. “Uh… not like this.” He keeps staring at Kylo, willing the man to get it without him having to say it.

Kylo either doesn’t get it, or isn’t capable of getting it, or is just being a bastard and is going to make Jon say it, because he’s sitting there looking stubbornly blank.

Jon sighs. “I was married to a _man,_ Kylo. Stick me in this position and there’ll be comments about the Master’s Mistress, okay?”

Kylo thinks about that for a moment, blinks, and then shrugs. “Only by someone who’s never seen me with Rey.”

Jon sighs. “And my last _friend_ was a lady. If they don’t assume I’m your pet, they’ll assume I’m her pet. Or that I belong to both of you.”

Kylo thinks about that for a moment, too. Of all the things that have been said about him over the years, the idea that he may be sleeping with Jon is so low on the list of problematic ones, he can’t bother to get fussed about it. “Would that bother you?”

Jon looks stunned. “Wouldn’t it bother _you?_ ”

Kylo keeps thinking about it. “It doesn’t appear to. I mean, I’m obviously playing favorites with you. You provide me with something I need, and I can trust you, and you aren't trying to kill me so you can take my place, so I’m raising you as far as I can as fast as you'll let me. If they talk about that, they’re dead right. If they think I’m sleeping with you, well, they’re obviously not terribly observant. Same for if they think you’re sleeping with Rey, or both of us.” He taps his fingers against the table top, and chews his lips. “You haven’t really seen both of us together, at the same time, for any real stretch of time, yet.”

Jon thinks about that, and comes to the conclusion that save for maybe a minute or two, he hasn’t really. “No.”

“Trust me, it’s going to be abundantly clear that whatever use we have with you, it’s not sexual, in about ten minutes after anyone sees us together. But, if they are blind, and they do gossip, will that bother you?”

Jon’s turn to think. He half shrugs. “I’d prefer that people thought I got my position from working my ass off, not working it on you, but… You’re right, they’ll talk no matter what, and it’s likely, because they know what I like, that some will spread nasty rumors no matter what.” Then Jon stops as he thinks of whatever this new position is. “Kylo, what in the name of the Force do you think my rank is?”

“I have _no_ idea. Hux always wanted to be a Grand Marshal. Something to cement the idea that he reported directly to Snoke into the heads of everyone else. And Threepio says the man who runs my diplomatic corps should be no lower than a Grand Marshal, so would you like that title?”

“Would anyone else have it?”

Kylo thinks about it for a moment. “Kinear and Schiff, eventually. My general, admiral, and…”

“Me.”

“And my you. Ground forces, sky forces, diplomatic forces. That covers all the angles, right?”

Jon sniggers. “Sure, why not?” He stands up, gathering up his papers. “Do you have any idea how much power you’re giving me with this?”

Kylo shrugs. “Do you think it matters to me?”

“I think it should.”

“Then I’ll try to care.”

Jon figures that’s about the best he can do with this. “So, if I’m doing this, what are you doing?”

“Being the Master. I write the play. You set the stage and make sure the other players are in place. Kinear and Schiff make sure no one else tries to direct or stop the damn thing.”

“Sure. Why not? You said something about the droid and Rey?”

“Yes, they’ll be here soon, and you can meet him.”

“ _I_ can meet him? Not us?”

Kylo winces. “Uh… Threepio’s not fond of me.” He gets himself a glass of water and sits down on his bed, pulling off his gloves and unfastening his tunic. His day is pretty much done. He’s just making sure this meeting goes smoothly from this side of things, and then he gets to go home to Rey. Which he really wants to do, because explaining why said droid isn’t a fan of his is making his heart ache.

“Fond… It’s a droid. How does fond ever come into play?”

“First of all, _he’s_ a fully sentient artificial life force. He’s got a full range of emotions and a functional moral compass. Anything you can do or feel, he can, too. Second of all, everything that’s happened in the last fifty years that mattered, he’s been part of. He knows everyone and anyone who’s been involved in the rise, fall, rise again, and fall again of the Rebellion and then Republic, and then Resistance.”

Jon grits his teeth. “He’s your mother’s chief adviser, isn’t he?”

“He was. And before that, he worked for her father, Bail Organa.”

Jon sighs. “And he’s going to take one look at me and decide I’m an Imperial and leave.”

“I really hope not.”

“He doesn’t like you; why would he go for me?”

Kylo takes a long drink, pulls his hair out of its knot, and runs his fingers through it. “He’s known me since before I was born, and… I was… volatile, as a child, with too much power and no control. I had a tendency to throw temper tantrums that shorted out the electronic equipment around me, and that included him.”

Jon winces.

“And… he’s my mother’s adviser, and devoted servant, loved her unreservedly, and, well…” The look he gives Jon gets across the idea that he more or less broke his mother’s heart when he joined the First Order. “And one of his other Masters, who he also loved beyond all reason, was Luke Skywalker.”

“The Uncle you put a lightsaber through?”

“Or would have if he’d really been there. And apparently, Threepio was there and watched me do it, and just like me, he didn’t know it wasn’t Luke’s actual body I was stabbing.” Kylo swallows, hard. “And he didn’t exactly love my Dad, but when I killed him, I didn’t endear myself to him—“

“Wait!” Jon’s eyes slowly close and then open again. “You…”

“It’s a really long story.”

Jon nods slowly, thinking about what he knows about Kylo’s side of the war and his mother’s side. The idea that his father would have been in the Resistance isn’t a stretch. “I’d imagine. Is that part of the tension with your Mum?”

Kylo opens and closes his mouth, thinking about it, but… “It didn’t help things, but… Actually, no our issues predate it and go past it…” That’s clearly not enough for Jon. “It’s one of those things that I don’t think could have happened any other way. That’s when and how Han Solo had to die, because anything else doesn’t get us here, and here… matters.”

Jon blinks slowly, and Kylo can feel him reassessing him, feel the nervousness, and the fear that had been easing away coming back to him. The man who would kill his father, even if said father was on the opposite side of the lines, is the man who may kill a friend, too.

“Jon… Things are different now. But… Now couldn’t have happened without then. That was the absolute worst moment of my life, and I've had some awfully bad ones, but that was the moment that broke Snoke’s hold on me. And without that… We’d still be the First Order, and… I’d be dead by now, I’m sure of that. Rey, too. Probably not Snoke. He and Hux would be off ruling whatever was left of the galaxy and… My mom had some level of prescience. I don’t, not really, but I don’t need it to see that. If Han Solo hadn’t died there, if he hadn’t come to me on Starkiller, the entire galaxy would be under the First Order, and Hux would be blowing up system for kicks and giggles, and Snoke would be the last Force power left, and…” And Kylo’s seeing it, really seeing it, and seeing Han’s eyes on his as he snuffed out his flame, feeling the sorrow, forgiveness, and hope. “And this had to happen.”

Kylo looks down, at his cup, and blinks. “He was always good at swooping in and saving the day at the last minute. Doing whatever needed to be done to do it. He never laid the blow that saved things himself, but he shot down the fighters trailing Luke, and he took down the shield generator protecting the Death Star, and he… sacrificed himself so that I could be more than a monster.”

Jon’s not sure what to do with any of that. One day, he’ll have the time to think about it, but now isn’t it. So he tucks it away, and pats Kylo on the shoulder, and says, “Okay. Theepio doesn’t like you. But he might work with me.”

“I hope so. We’re not doing anything he wouldn’t be willing to support, so… If he can get over not liking me or how I got here, he might be willing to support our present and future.”

Jon nods. “Making the best of the situation you’re in rather than pining for the situation you don’t have?”

“Yeah.” Kylo looks away from his drink. “Uh… The one thing he’s always wanted is recognition. He never really got it. Even in the New Republic, droids weren’t really people. But… He’s people. So, I know you want to be inconspicuous for right now, but feel free to offer him a rank and command privileges. That’s probably the only level I can do him one better than my mother ever did, so…”

Jon shrugs. “I can do that.” He inclines his head a little. “Probably go a ways to making him not see an Imperial when he looks at me. The Emperor never had any use for the idea that droids, or non-humans even, were people.”

Kylo nods. “They’re all people. If it can think and feel and act, it’s people.”

Jon smiles at that, very pleased to hear it come out of Kylo. “And we welcome any people who want to work with us.”

“Exactly.”

 

 

* * *

The last time Threepio was on an Empire ship… Okay, he’s not on an Empire ship. The Empire has been gone for three decades. And, supposedly, this isn’t a First Order ship, either. Not anymore.

Whatever this is… Kylo’s flagship… it gives him the willies.

“Why is it all black?” he asks Rey as he looks around Kylo’s office.

“That’s just the way it was when they gave him these rooms,” Rey replies.

“I feel like I’m about to be fed into a trash compactor.”

“I’m utterly certain that’s not about to happen.”

“And is _he_ here?”

Rey nods. “We’re in his office. He’s in the bedroom, about seven meters from here.” She can feel Jon and Kylo talking on the other side of the door. “If I knew Jon’s rooms, I could have taken you directly there, but I don’t. Do you want to see Kylo as well as Jon?”

“Lt. Colonel Frakes is enough for right now.”

“Okay.” She sends Kylo the message, and a minute later Jon steps out of his room.

Threepio can’t wince, or cringe, or make any non-verbal expression of disgust, that said, Rey can feel his distaste at what, to him, looks exactly like a perfect Imperial in a dress uniform.

Jon, to his credit, does something no member of the Empire ever would have, he offers Threepio his hand, and says, “Jon Frakes, I understand you and I may work together.”

Rey sags in relief at that. Threepio’s almost startled at being greeted, especially by someone in what he considers to be an Empire uniform, as a person. But he snaps out of it, and offers his hand as well as he can. “See-Threepio, Human-Cyborg Relations.”

Jon smiles at him. “I understand you’re quite more than that. Kylo tells me that every important event in the last fifty years, you’ve been there.”

“Most of them, sir.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I like being called Sir at least as much as the next officer, and maybe a tad more, but if you’ve got the information I need, you’re very rapidly going to find yourself outranking me. At least, until I decide that I can do a better job in the open than in the shadows.”

Threepio can’t smile at that, but the idea that he might have a formal rank has never occurred to him. No one had ever thought to offer him one before.

“You see me having a rank?” Threepio sounds stunned, and very, very pleased.

“In The Order, if you can do the job, you get the rank to go with it, and right now, I need people who can do the job, so I don’t care if your brain is metal and mine is meat, there’s nothing inherently superior about being born versus being manufactured. So… General Threepio of the Order Diplomatic Corps, do you want to see what you can do for spreading the idea that the Order is here to build connections and get people working together for a common goal?”

“That depends entirely on the goal.”

Jon smiles. “That’s a good point. Right now, we’re starting very basic: people, not planets, and people _join_ us, we don’t conquer them. Beyond that, eventually, we’ll get enough citizens into place to have elections, and representatives, and they’ll help us figure out where, exactly we’re taking everyone.”

“And if your people vote to conquer things right and left once you’ve got them voting?”

Jon feels Kylo in the back of his head saying: _That’s the thing they won’t be able to vote for._ “That’ll be a bedrock principal. People come to us, not the other way around.”

Threepio inclines his head. “I’m amenable to listening to more.”

Jon smiles. “Good, come on, let’s go for a walk. Do you want to stay here, or have Rey and Kylo shuttle you back and forth?”

“If what Rey is telling me is right, you’ve got at least five hundred people you need some sort of dossier on.”

“Yes.”

“And let me guess, no one who knows better has seen your seating plan?”

“Also a yes.”

“Or gone over your menu?”

“That’s true, too.”

“Get me a room here, your seating chart, menu, and direct access to your catering team.”

Jon grins at Threepio, and then at Rey. “I think we’re set up. You have a good night.”

Rey nods at them, pleased to see this level of getting along, as Jon walks Threepio out of Kylo’s office toward the best set of rooms he’s got ready to put into play.  

 


	59. Grandeur

12/26/1

 

“You’re nervous,” Kylo says as Jon enters his office, a black bundle in his hands.

“No shit. Here.”

Kylo takes the bundle, looking at it. “Formal wear for the Last Night dinner?”

Jon snorts a fast laugh. “Yeah. Uh, no. I’ll get that done about ten minutes before you need to put it on. New command blacks.”

Kylo eyes the fabric in his hands. He can see several textures, a few grays, some shiny black metal, and more bits and bobs than his current blacks, his very comfortable current blacks, have. “These are fancier than my current ones.”

Jon nods. “It’s the concurrence of myself, Lady Kinear, and Threepio that palaces tend to be fancy sorts of places, and I know we don’t have your palace up and running yet, but you want a palace sort of feel, so…”

Kylo nods at that, too. “Okay.”

“And you’ve been wearing them more or less non-stop for at least a year and a half, so they’re starting to get a bit worn.”

Kylo inclines his head. He thinks he’s got three sets of them. He’s not sure. He knows he pulls fresh ones out of his closet in the morning when he gets dressed. And yes, they are starting to get a bit soft and worn, because, actually, he’s been wearing them for getting onto five years now. “True.” But that’s also why they’re comfortable.

Jon sighs. “Don’t give me that look. I’m not killing your pet. You’ve got informal clothing, wear it when you’re off duty. This is for when you actually want to look like The Master, got it?”

Kylo nods again. “Sure. Uh…”

“Yes, go put it on.”

Kylo smirks. “Make a good impression on your mom?”

“Bloody hell, _yes._ The old bat barely thinks I’m competent to begin with, _please_ attempt to make a good impression on her.”

 _That_ Kylo understands. “On it.”

 

 

* * *

“I like the gray,” Kylo says to Jon, once he’s got the new blacks on. They’ve got gray on the sleeves, and some detailing around the collar, and on the cloak.

“Rey said you would,” Jon replies, edging them toward the door, ready to go meet his mother.

“She’s right. I like black, too, but… I could do with some gray, or colors.”

Jon nods at that, thinking more about what’s coming up than what they’re doing. But, as they walk through Kylo’s office, what he said is actually filtering through, and Jon replies to him, “You know, your rooms don’t actually have to be entirely black.”

Kylo shrugs.

“If you told him to, C8 could have physical plant up here in probably less than an hour, paint brushes at the ready.”

Kylo squints a bit, trying to imagine his office and rooms _not_ black. Trying to imagine having _choice_ in the matter.

It seems daunting.

“I even happen to know for a fact, that some of them are really quite good at laying out a room and making it look nice.”

“You’ve got them working overtime on the suites for our guests.”

“I do, but like with everything else, come the second, they’ll be done.”

Kylo nods at that. They’re in his not-a-throne room, which is starting to fill with more tables, and there’s a bar at the far end with several droids stocking it, and three men are installing… something… it’s going to be impressive, but he doesn’t know what it is, yet, where his throne used to be, and there’s a massive flowering tree at the far end, blooming in pinks and greens, and…

“What would you suggest they look like if they weren’t all black?” Kylo asks.

“I’ve got an actual, physical book coming, with pictures. I’d suggest you and Rey looking through it and seeing if there’s anything you like.”

“I can do that.”

 

* * *

“You’re doing a good job,” Kylo says to Jon as they’re in the lift, heading toward the docking bay where Jon’s mom and sister will be landing. Even if he couldn’t see the tension in Jon’s face, he can feel it coming off of him in waves.

Jon barks a short laugh. “Thank you for being kind, but Kylo, and I say this as someone who genuinely respects you, you wouldn’t know a good job on this sort of thing if it walked up, bit you on the ass, and took both legs clean off.”

Kylo half-inclines his head. That’s likely true. “Fair enough. That said, there’s only two opinions that matter as to the quality of this job, and that’s mine and yours, and by mine, you’re doing fine.”

Jon manages a slight smile. “I appreciate it.”

“You’re still nervous.”

Jon shrugs.

“The last time I saw my mom, I cried,” Kylo says.

Jon inclines his head a bit at that, too. Then says, “Yeah, but weren’t you a kid or something?”

“It was the last formal dinner.”

Jon blinks and swallows. “Uh… wasn’t she dead?”

“Yes. The Force makes some things complicated. Like, for example, no one, no matter how much easier life would be without them, is ever really gone.”

“Ah…”

They’re quiet for a moment.

“What’d you talk about?” Jon asks.

“Probably the sort of stuff you’re nervous about. Who… Ben… That’s the name she gave me, was supposed to be. Who I am now. If I’m doing a good job, or at least better than she feared. Stuff like that.”

Jon sighs a bit, “Yeah, that’s a lot of it.”

Another quiet moment. “So…” Jon says.

Kylo shrugs. “Long day, big argument. Stuff normal people either never have to deal with or figure out in their teens. I went home, curled around Rey, and collapsed. She snuggled me and let me cry until I fell asleep.”

Jon’s looking at the doors to the lift. “Lane’s memorial. That’s the last time I saw her in person. I was pretty… gone… but, I mean, she’s been there. Did the same thing for my dad. So, that was good, and for a little while we were just, together, and it was okay. I mean… I’m still her son, and if I need to curl up and have a cry, because the universe just ripped my heart out, she’s good for that, but… this isn’t comfort or being or us as people. This is me as a professional, in her sphere, not just her sphere, but the sphere where she is considered one of the best in the galaxy, trying to live up to the Frakes name, and…” his voice trails off, as the light that indicates they’ve hit their floor flickers.

Kylo gives his shoulder a little squeeze, and then the doors open, and they head out into the AA deck, where private ships coming and going to the _Supremacy_ dock.

 

 

* * *

Mirina Frakes is a queen.

A small one, granted. She’s 1.5 meters standing up straight, but a queen none the less.

Kylo looks at Rey and sees _his_ queen. He spent more than enough time in the orbit of a literal princess who became a senator and then a general. He watched Phasma put a legion of men in their place. He has an image in his mind of decidedly feminine power and a beyond healthy respect for it.

But watching her walk down the ramp of the transport ship, feeling Jon fidgeting beside him, seeing her take everything in, and give just a tiny little sniff to indicate that, well, the _Supremancy_ is okay, it’s certainly _big_ enough, but it looks like it was decorated by vandals and rather grubby ones at that, _and_ two steps into this that everyone around her should just fall in line behind her and obey, that Kylo is getting a sense of what someone who expects their orders to be taken literally, and done without a thought, looks like.

Mirina Frakes is a _queen._ And she _knows_ it.

Snoke had some of this. That wave of raw power about him. The expectation that whatever he wanted would happen, and just him wanting it would make it so.

But, while he could also feel waves of fear and pain pouring off of Snoke, there’s none of that to Lady Frakes. She exudes a calm and quiet strength.

She’s not actually beautiful, and likely never was. It takes a good minute of looking at her before Kylo can recognize it. Her face is plain, eyes a non-descript dark color, nose too narrow and long, lips too thin. He sincerely doubts that ever mattered, though. Her hair, blonde fading into silver, is immaculately wrapped around her head in a collection of braids. Her posture is perfect. Her dress… he doesn’t pay much attention to clothing on women who aren’t Rey, unless it covers everything (meaning armor) or nothing (meaning he’s still not really looking at the clothing) but this dress… He can’t tell you _why_ it’s got his attention. It’s just a very well cut traveling suit, with a long skirt, in a gray and violet, that flatters her complexion. It shouldn’t be anything special. _She_ shouldn’t be anything special.

But she is.

 

 

She’s looking at her son, squeezing his hands, offering him a bit of a smile, when Kylo feels it, and recognizes it. Not enough Force talent to train. Not even the level his mother could bring into play. But more than enough for a… glamour he guesses. There were stories he read as a child, of wizards who could use their power to make people like them, make themselves beautiful even if they weren’t.

And he guesses that any garment she touches, any design she puts her mind and skills to, sparkles with her magic.

It’s an interesting thought to him, can an… inanimate object, some sort of _thing_ hold some magic of the Force. He knows places can, but… a dress?

It’s also a moot thought. She’s hugging Jon, looking up at him, and he’s a second away from introducing her, and his sister, to Kylo, so he needs to be paying attention to them, not to random bits of magical theology.

He tucks it away to talk to Rey about later, and then looks down at the woman in front of him.

 

 

* * *

“Master Ren, my mother, Mirina Frakes, and my oldest sister, Tasha Spiner.”

He nods at the women before him, and Mirina looks up to him and says, with a similar nod of her head, “Emperor Ren.”

Kylo licks his lips, less than thirty seconds have passed since he’s been correctly introduced and he can _feel_ Jon blushing because Jon has already explained that who he works for, and he isn’t an Emperor, and that’s kind of a sticking point, and...

“Master, my lady,” Kylo tries something of a smile on his face and a bit of an annoyed glint in his eyes.

She’s looking up at him, and he’s fairly sure he’s, less than three quarters of a minute into this, failed at making sure that _no one_ feels how much he’s not enjoying this, which is irking him even more, and then she says, “Master Simmons taught me my times tables and how to measure fabric. The man who runs an _empire_ is an Emperor. _Emperor Ren._ ”

He doesn’t exactly glare, but his eyes are hotter than normal. “And I’m going to give the entire galaxy a lesson on how to rule, so _Master_ is appropriate.”

“Touchy bastard, aren’t you?”

 

 

It’s a test, he knows it’s a test. Jon’s sister is bored by this, and if it weren’t a test, she’d be, like Jon, about to die from embarrassment or wet herself from fear.

“Possibly,” he says. “I never thought to ask if my parents got married. They didn’t share a family name, so maybe they didn’t. But that’s nothing to do with my title. _Master Ren._ If you cannot keep to that,” he gestures to the transport, “your ship is behind you.”

Mirina blinks, stares at him for a second, really looking at him, and then smirks. “You’ll do.”

This time he does glare, and thinks to Jon. _This is what I hate about dealing with people._

Jon blinks at him, and Kylo can feel that this is part of why he’s trying to keep Kylo from having to meet every damn person in the universe who matters, because most of them, especially at the level who are coming to this thing are going to be trying to test him.

Kylo sighs a bit, _I know._

Mirina is still looking him over. “You’re younger, of course, but you do have a lot of the feel of him. Back when he was the Chancellor, that’s the kind of answer he would have given to someone being intentionally rude to him.”

The last thing he wants to do is emulate the man who blew up planets for fun. Then his eye twitches a bit, as he mentally growls. She’s watching, waiting to see him respond to that. _That_ was a test, too.

And then he stops, because if she’ll do this to him, she might decide to test Rey, too.

He turns to Mirina, eyes on her, hot, and says, “If you feel you have to test me, fine. Do it. I’ll roll my eyes and take it. But you’re not here for me. And you’re not here for whichever collected _them_ you’ll gossip about me to _._ I do not much care if _you and they_ talk about me being boorish or lacking in manners and graces. You’re here for my wife, who I am attempting to coax, gently, into actually doing this with me, as such I want this to be an enjoyable and pleasant experience for her, and if you make her, for an instant, even contemplate thinking about regretting this, I will make you _regret_ it.” He smiles as he says it, and feels Jon go pale beside him. Jon’s sister is starting to look nervous, and he feels the hair on the back of Mirina’s neck rise.

Because this is _not_ a test. It’s a warning and a promise.

Mirina knows she’s poked a killer, one who intends to protect his mate.

She straightens herself up to her full height, putting her eyes level with his nipples, and then looks up directly into his eyes. He can feel her thinking, _interesting set of priorities._ “I didn’t get where I am by making women regret retaining my services, and I won’t start doing it with your wife. Be calm,” he can feel her Force, mild and untrained and likely unconscious, laying a soothing energy on him, “if your Lady doesn’t enjoy this, it won’t be because of anything I’ve done or didn’t do.”

Kylo nods. “Good.”

“Speaking of your lady,” Tasha says, voice gentle, “when do we get to meet her?”

“I wasn’t sure how taxing you’d find the trip,” Jon replies, though it’s clear that’s aimed at their mother. “Do you want to go to your rooms, rest?”

Kylo quietly mentally smirks at the amount of _I am not a feeble old woman_ coming off of Mirina and aimed at her son right now. He also takes a moment to think to Rey, _Busy?_

He gets the sense of them all in the chapel, chatting away about… if droids are part of the Force, and for a long moment he really wishes he were there because that would be an interesting conversation to be part of, but… Well… Actually… If she’s here, maybe he could… Okay, no, he’s still got at least a dozen reports on his desk, and the First Year Speech isn’t done, though it’s flowing significantly better now that he’s killed the idea of Emperor Ren, and…

_Jon’s mom is here, just waiting for you._

_What’s she like?_

_Short._

He can feel her exasperation from the other side of the galaxy. _Yes, that’s exactly what I wanted to know._

He glances at Mirina and Tasha and Jon, who are talking about at least visiting their rooms to get their things settled and make sure everything’s in place. _She’s… intense._

_Intense good, or intense run-for-the-dunes?_

_Some of both?_

He can feel the expression on her face before _How’s Jon?_ echoes through his mind.

_I think he prefers having a wing of the galaxy between them. He’s looking a bit uncomfortable._

_Poor boy. Only a bit?_

“Mom, really. Let’s get you settled first. I don’t think she’s even on ship right now, so you might as well take a moment to unpack and—“

“She’s not on ship,” Kylo adds. _And won’t be soon?_

_We’re having a good conversation, an hour or so?_

“She’ll be here in an hour or so.”

 _Really, how is Jon doing?_ Rey asks.

 _I’m probably not the best person to ask._ Both of them know his scale of getting-along-with-Mom isn’t exactly _normal.  He’s not about to cry or hit something, so…_

_Okay._

Mirina is looking up at Kylo again. “She’s not here?”

“No. She has a job, and she’s doing it. She’ll come when she gets some free time,” Kylo says.

Mirina eyes Jon. “You’ve called me here to just wait around?”

Kylo whips around toward Mirina, eyes hot. He bends a bit, so he can look her right in the eye, and show her what someone who has conscious control of his Force can do with it. “Get this straight right now or leave, I don’t care if you treat me with annoyance or not. My wife is another story all together, and you will treat her as a goddess. You will act as if it is your greatest life’s pleasure to wait upon her as long as she sees fit. From where you stand, she outranks everyone on this ship, including me, including _you_ , by farther than you can see. Now make up your damn mind, either get behind this, and act like this is the most valuable client you will _ever_ have, or get back on that ship and stop wasting your son’s time and mine.”

 

 

Mirina looks at him, his eyes hot, daring her to set a toe out of line, and then she laughs, long and loud. She gently reaches out and pats Kylo’s hand. “Oh, you are so in love. Now why was Jon telling me we’re not designing a wedding gown?”

“Because if this doesn’t go well,” Kylo says through gritted teeth, “there’s no shot of me convincing her that she wants the sort of wedding where a gown would be appropriate.”

“All the more reason for this to go well. All right. Jon, show me to our rooms. Tasha, you’ve got the tools?”

“Of course, Mom.”

“Excellent, let’s go.”

As they’re walking out Kylo can feel Jon thinking _Why, why, why did I ever set this up? I am an exceptional dressmaker, I can forge the damn mark, and no one would have been able to tell the difference…_

 

* * *

Imperial City, towering so far into the sky that the lowest levels haven’t seen sunlight in centuries, is an abundant hunting ground for many things.

Nature not among them.

It does, however, have a few zoos, and it’s at one of those zoos that Mirina Frakes once saw a Great Black Urus. It was a huge shaggy creature, towering over the other wildlife in the zoo, black fur covering it, save in the places covered in deep scars. It had long, sharp claws and teeth, and supposedly was one of the most dangerous creatures in the galaxy. Said Urus’ mate was heavy with their cubs, and, well… Let’s just say she’s got a working theory for why Emperor Ren is so protective of his Rey.

Once they’re in Jon’s room, she says, “When is the baby due?”

Jon shakes his head. “If she’s pregnant, I don’t know about it.”

Mirina and Tasha share a look. All of the Frakes women can spot a pregnancy at a thousand meters, and usually within hours of the indicator turning blue, but for whatever reason, Jon can’t.

“Well, show me,” she says to her son, dropping that. If he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know. She wants to see what he’s made before she’s going to see about putting it on this woman she’s never met.

He’s got the dress form ready to go, with a mostly finished gown on it. The gems haven’t been fully set into the belt, they’re currently in there with just paste, and the seams are all still in need of one final go-over, but that’s usual. If she sees it on Rey and wants to make serious changes it’ll be much easier to rip out this way.

Jon just looks at it. After all, it’s sitting in the middle of the room, and Mirina gives him a bit of the side-eye. Unlike his sisters, he’s not standing before it, going over what he did. She’s glad to see where his career is taking him, and glad to see Emperor Ren valuing what he has to offer, and she’d always hoped he’d get more self-assertive, but it is putting a bit of a pinch in Jon’s ability to take, or care about, _her_ criticism.

 

 

That said, it’s good work. If it fits Rey the way it fits the dressform, he’s done a good job, and all she’s here to do is put her stamp on it and offer whatever blessing she can to the party.

“He’s serious about not being an Emperor?” Mirina asks, eyeing the dress.

Jon rolls his eyes. “He’s serious about everything, Mom. I’m not sure if that man has a not-serious bone in his body. Basically, he’s got two speeds, full-on and asleep.”

“That sounds like Palpatine, too,” Tasha, who was ten when the Empire fell, says.

“That sounds like the last few years of the Emperor. He wasn’t like that when he took over,” Mirina clarifies.

“Avoiding how that story ended is likely why he’s intentionally going against the grain,” Jon says. “He’s… very intense… about having people join him of their own free will. Not conquering people and things really matters to him, and, unless I missed more of my history lessons than I thought I did, Palpatine was big on conquering everything that wasn’t interested in joining him of it’s own free will.”

“Well, yes… But that’s how you get an _Empire,_ ” Mirina says.

“Yes, well, he’d rather go small and get people, than go big and have to invade systems and planets.”

Mirina shakes her head a bit. “How is that even going to work, Jon?”

He half smiles. “Honestly. I think it’s going to work really well. What’s the point of _land_ when we live in a galaxy of ships as big a cities?” His smile spreads. “He’s not kidding about teaching the galaxy a new lesson. Deciding who gets what based on the ground under someone’s feet is archaic. Not in a galaxy as mobile as ours is.”

“You always were a dreamer.”

Jon smirks a bit. “Well, he likes my dreams enough that by the time I get all of my pieces into play, I’ll be something like his left hand, so…” he gestures to the dress, “is it good?”

Mirina smiles at him. She may not love the lesson this new Master intends to teach, but she’s devoutly in favor of her son being a step or two from the top of the pyramid. “It’s good.”

 

 

* * *

Fifty minutes later, when Rey has come to the Supremacy, and Jon is ushering his mother and sister into Kylo’s rooms, she takes a moment to look around and quietly say, “Why is it all black?”

Kylo, who is waiting for them, with Rey, ignores that. Rey sniggers slightly at it.

Jon quietly responds with, “We’re working on that.” Then he steps over to Rey, who is standing, back against the dining table, next to Kylo, who is holding her hand, and says, “Rey, this is my mom. Mirina Frakes, Rey.”

“Rey…” Mirina leads, looking for a last name.

He sees her eyes glance over to Kylo and his eyebrow raises for a second, she looks back at him, and he knows they’re talking, but he doesn’t know what they’re saying.

A second later, Rey says, “Amidala. Rey Amidala.”

That name means nothing to Jon, but his mother apparently knows it because she stiffens, slightly, blinks, and then looks from Kylo to Rey and back again, before offering her hands, to Rey, and smiling. “Lovely to meet you, Rey Amidala. This is my daughter Tasha, and I understand we’re here to make sure you have the best time possible on your maiden voyage into the waters of political life.”

Rey offers a little, skeptical smile as well, and says, “That’s the idea.”

Then Mirina looks to Kylo any says, “Shoo… You’re the only person here who doesn’t belong here. Off you go.”

Jon watches another one of those silent conversations between Rey and Kylo, followed by a warm kiss, and Rey gently squeezing his hands, before he says, “I’m still fighting with the first year speech, but it’s almost done.”

“Good,” Jon replies. “We’re getting close to needing it done. You’ll let me read it?”

Kylo nods, and heads out of the room.

Jon opens the bag with the dress in it, laying it out on the bed, as his sister ushers Rey off to the refresher with another bag, this one with ‘underthings’ in it, and they go do whatever it is they’re going to do outside the line of his view.

 

 

* * *

So, the only surprise Mirina’s running into as she meets Rey for the first time is that she doesn’t appear to be pregnant. She’s got no sense of it, at all, so, either the indicator turned blue this morning, and she’s so new to it that Mirina just can’t feel it, or… The Great Black Urus in this case is just overly protective of his mate.

Rey and Tasha are still in the refresher, getting her measured for proper undergarments, part of what they’ll be working on between now and the dinner, and getting her into ones that are close enough. Mirina quietly says to her son, “She’s not.”

Jon shrugs a bit. “She has a school. Teaches children. They may not be in any sort of hurry to have their own.”

Mirina can see that. And Rey’s young. She might have goals beyond cranking out babies. Still… The Great Black Urus… “So… that’s him… just with her?”

Jon laughs. “Uh, yeah. Don’t get me wrong, he’s got me making armor for her so she can go into battle by his side, but she’s apparently comfortable doing that. Fancy dress parties are a different story all together.” He laughs again. “He’ll be insane once she’s actually pregnant.”

“No rush on a wedding dress, then?” Having had five of her own babies, and having, back when she was young and still building her reputation, dressed many a pregnant bride, Mirina’s brand now has one ironclad rule about pregnant brides, the wedding either happens before you’re six weeks on, or after the child is a year old.

Weddings are stressful enough without adding morning sickness, an aching body, insane mood swings, exhaustion, eternal re-measuring and refitting, no sleep, nursing every three hours, and the rest of the ups and downs of pregnancy and infancy. Nope. It’s not worth it.

So, either before her body really starts to change, or after the kid’s is a toddler.

“If there is, I don’t know about it, and _they_ don’t know about it. And from what I can tell, _they’ll_ know, and once he knows, I’m going to know, too, because that man has _no_ ability to keep his emotions off his face.”

“Can she?”

Jon shrugs. “I don’t know. If she’s ever lied to me, I haven’t caught it.”

“Well, let’s hope one of them is good at it, or this adventure is going to go up in flames, fast.”

“Or, maybe, just maybe, Mom, if your entire political culture is based on the idea of having people join you of their own free will, maybe, you don’t have to constantly lie to them to get them to do stuff for you.”

Mirina pats her son’s face, gently. “I do love the fact that you’re still so optimistic. I worried about you after Lane died, afraid that killed your hope.”

Jon glares at her. “You know, if there hadn’t been any sarcasm in your voice, that would have been a really nice moment.”

Mirina looks a little uncomfortable. “It wasn’t entirely, or even mostly sarcastic.”

He sighs, a little. The first sentence was sarcastic, the second hadn’t been. “Perhaps the word you wanted to replace optimism with was naivety?”

“Perhaps. I did worry, though.”

Jon nods, and wraps an arm around his mom. “I know.”

“You look better.”

“I am.”

“And tired.”

That gets an eye roll. Everyone in his family knows the week before a big party, sleep is something you remember fondly, not do. “Yeah, well… So would you in this job.”

“Did he get you some help?”

“Yes, actually. I’ve got a few new helpers who are going over the seating chart and menu right now, doing some last minute tweaking, making sure that no one who hates each other is seated right next to each other, and that we’re not feeding them something taboo.”

“That’s a good place to start. Who’s the help?”

“The one’s a droid. I don’t think you could possibly know him. The other is Lady Kinear, General Patrick Kinear’s—“

“Oh, I know Ellie.” Mirina, for the first time today, looks genuinely impressed by something. “He’s got the Kinears on his side?”

“Yeah.”

Mirina smiles. “Who knows, maybe he will be able to pull this off.”

“This: the party, or this: the Order?”

“Let’s see how the party goes before we get thinking too big.”

* * *

Rey was expecting Jon’s mom to be… Well, terrifying. She was expecting to have Mirina look at her and see a teaming collection of flagrant flaws and blemishes. (Stupid fucking cycle, there’s three pimples on her forehead right now, and one on her chin, and she’s begging the Force that they’re gone by the 31st.)

But, at least as of this point, Mirina’s just been warm toward her.

Jon’s sister, though. She’s not… mean, but very judgmental. She’s got Rey in the refresher, naked, measuring her for underthings, and she’s got a mental catalog of… everything that’s got to happen, or change, or… whatever.

And, okay, Rey doesn’t mind the idea of getting her nails done again. (Tasha absolutely noticed the chipped lacquer, and is loudly thinking about if it’s possible to add gloves to the dress to cover Rey’s cuticles.) But she doesn’t see why any of her remaining body hair needs to be… groomed… whatever the hell that is. And there’s nothing wrong with her toes, thank you very much, they’re exactly the way toes are supposed to be, and if they’ve got some hair on them, well, that’s just how toes work. And her breasts are exactly the way she likes them, they don’t need to be yanked up to practically her ears, and padded, or… she doesn’t know what contouring is, but isn’t about to volunteer for it. Likewise, she’s not sure what the hell it is Tasha’s going on about with heels. She has heels, they’re attached to her feet, and she’s been walking on them for as long as she’s been walking, so the idea that she might not know what to do with heels seems beyond silly to her.

When she explains that, Tasha doesn’t laugh, she just blinks, slowly, and her mouth drops open, because she hadn’t been _saying_ any of this out loud, _and_ Rey doesn’t actually know what heels are.

She finally says, “Shoes. Shoes with a raised heel. They make you taller, and change your walk a little, make you wiggle more with each step, and exaggerate the curve of your back and buttocks. They take extra balance to walk in because the heel is high and usually fairly small.”

Rey blinks. “Oh. Uh… Yeah. I’ve never done that before.”

Tasha nods. “Your butt doesn’t need the extra lift, but the curves would be nice, and assuming your man can watch you walk in a pair without passing out or hitting every other man with eyes in the place, they might be a good idea. Assuming you can walk in them.”

“Why would he hit people?” That’s got Rey surprised. She can think of a lot of reasons for Kylo to hit people, her walking wiggly isn’t one of them.

Tasha’s eyeing Rey, debating a long-lined bra or a corset. The stopgap bra they’ll use for this fitting is a long-lined one, but Rey doesn’t have a lot of waist, and a corset might help with that, though the likelihood of getting any level of tight lacing for this seems unlikely in a girl who doesn’t know what heels are. Or why her wildly over-protective man might be disturbed by her wiggling around in front of other people.

“Have you been out in public with him… All dressed up?” Tasha thinks that might be a way to gently broach the subject.

“Yes. Twice.”

“And he was… fine?”

“Why wouldn’t he have been?”

Tasha blinks, surprised by that, but if Kylo can attend a party with his wife and not freak out at other men looking at her, all the better. “Some men get jealous when other men look at their women.”

Rey thinks about that, and laughs. Hard. The idea that Kylo would even approach feeling insecure about her affections because some other man looks at her is ridiculously funny to Rey.

“And some men, even if they aren’t jealous, don’t like other men appreciating their women.”

That’s a lot less funny to Rey. “You think they’ll… appreciate?”

“Assuming they can see and like women, yes. The ones at a party like this will generally have the manners to not let it show on their face, but… That’s not exactly going to help with you or the Master, now will it?”

Rey nods, slowly, wondering how that will work. If Kylo catches some other man undressing her with his eyes, or fantasizing about her… Then Tasha hits her with something else, “And how are you going to handle being in a crowd, where at least ten percent of the women and probably three percent of the men will be there specifically for the purpose of attempting to seduce your husband?”

Rey blinks, slowly, and lets out a long breath. “I don’t know.” She’s feeling nervous now. “What are you supposed to do?”

“That depends on how blatant they are about it, and how your man reacts. If he’s being out and out propositioned and turns her down, there’s nothing for you to do. If you catch a few looking from the far side of the room, again, there’s nothing for you to do. Unless you want everyone to know you read minds. Non-physical flirting is generally considered appropriate and allowable. Touching, as long as it’s hands, arms, or shoulders, is also considered within bounds.”

Rey tries to imagine how it would feel to see another woman touch Kylo, with intent. And she just… can’t. She has no idea how it’d make her feel.

“We’ll cross that dune when we get to it,” she says.

“Probably a wise way to look at it.” Tasha glances at Rey’s hips. “You’ve never worn a garter belt before, have you?”

“I don’t even know what one is.”

“Stockings?”

“Nope.”

Tasha sighs. “Okay…”

 

 

* * *

Apparently, stockings are very thin, translucent, silky socks that come up to the thighs. Garter belts are the things that keep them up. Rey’s got the sense Kylo’s going to _appreciate_ both of these things. The bra Tasha put her in isn’t _that_ high or _that_ padded, but she does feel like she’s got more in the way of breasts than she normally does. The shoes have a little heel, about five centimeters more than usual, and are just as wide as the heel on a flat shoe. They’ll make her taller, but not alter her gait or posture that much.

Tasha’s been eyeing the dress, and Rey, and then gently takes her hair out of it’s pony tail and fluffs it a little. “We’ll style it for the day, probably put it up, but… This is just a rough draft, see how it all looks.” She also eyes Rey’s throat, ears, and wrists. “Do you have jewelry for this?”

“I’m wearing it.”

Tasha looks her over, sees the ring, and nothing else, and says, “Ah… I’ll see what we can borrow.”

“Jon said we didn’t need any because of the jewels on the dress.” Rey feels Tasha clamp her thoughts on that down fast. Apparently, whatever Jon said about that isn’t right. And there’s got to be a reason for it. Rey adds, “I’ve got some arm chains.” She touches her bicep where the jewelry she wore with the saree started.

“Bring that, I’ll want to see it with the dress.”

“Okay.” Rey’s looking at herself in the mirror. “Am I dressed?”

Tasha nods. “I think so.” She nods to the door. “Let Mom see, she’s the final voice.”

 

 

* * *

Rey’s breath holds for a moment as she steps out. She feels Jon’s do the same thing, both of them waiting to see what his mom has to say/think.

“Oh, Rey!” She opens her arms wide, takes both of Rey’s hands, and gives them a squeeze before stepping back and saying, “Let me look at you!” She walks around Rey, muttering things like, “Lovely, just lovely,” or, “He’s going to go mute when he sees you,” or “I don’t know about this Master nonsense, but you’re what an Empress looks like…”

And Rey relaxes, feeling like, for the first time, she might be able to do this.

 

 

* * *

It’s when Rey steps out in the dress, and his mother goes to her, that Jon remembers exactly why he’s put himself through this.

Mirina Frakes can be prickly, she can be rude, she’s probably got an overly high opinion of herself and her place in the world, but right now, she’s doing the thing that only she does.

She makes women beautiful. Jon’s seen it over and over. Doesn’t matter how homely a woman is in real life, by the time his mother is done with them, they sparkle. And it’s not as if a well cut and fitted gown has some sort of magic. It won’t make a stout woman thin and willowy. It won’t hide ‘imperfections.’ It can’t suddenly make a woman into a perfectly proportioned and symmetrical statue.

Honestly, when he told Kylo no one has the touch his mother does, he meant it, literally. There’s something about his mother’s touch that does it. The women that come to her, that spend time with her, who get to see themselves through her eyes… They don’t change. Their skin doesn’t magically clear up, and they don’t suddenly get even features, but they do glow.

They understand and accept their own beauty, and that shines through them. Put that in a spectacularly well-cut gown with exquisitely done hair and cosmetics, and… There’s nothing at all like it.

And if anyone else, at all, can do what Mirina Frakes can do, Jon’s never heard of her.

 

 

* * *

“Okay, the doors open at 17:30 on the 31st. That means we’ll start getting ready about 13:00. Rey, do you have a lady friend or two who might want to come to this? Getting dressed and ready can be a bit on the dull side, and if you’ve got a friend or two who might want to join you, it’ll be more fun,” Mirina says.

Rey licks her lips. “Maybe. Uh… I’m not sure if we’ve got someone to watch Paige.”

“Paige?” Jon asks.

“Rose and Finn’s baby. Do babies come to things like this?”

“They’ve been known to. Gatherings of women, especially young ones, often have babies at them,” Tasha says.

“What would she do? Just… keep me company?”

“Will she ever… attend something like this,” Jon asks, knowing that there’s this other half of Rey and Kylo’s life he’s only just starting to get a hint about.

Rey rubs her eyes together. “Uh… Maybe… She and her husband are talking about going to Canto Bight to play at some point.”

“Well, if they’re going to play, she’ll need to be dressed and ready for it. Would I be right in assuming she’s never done anything like this before?” Mirina says.

“You’d be right.”

“She’ll come, get her hair and nails done, too. Keep you company. If there’s time, Tasha may sketch a dress.”

Rey, Jon, and Tasha look surprised at that.

“Thank you,” Rey says. “Uh… I… We… can’t pay for it.”

Mirina waves that away. “Having my brand associated with the Court of Emperor Ren will be more than worth it.”

“He’s really not an Emperor,” Rey says.

“Dear, he can call himself whatever he likes, but those of us who know, _know_ what he is.”

Rey looks to Jon, and he minutely shakes his head, so she drops it.

Mirina isn’t ready to let it drop, yet. “Being an Emperor isn’t about conquering things. It’s about having an _empire._ If you can unite disparate peoples and systems together under your rule… It doesn’t matter how you get them together, you’ve got an empire, and that makes you an _Emperor._ And one day, perhaps, he’ll get comfortable enough with it to claim the title he deserves.”

Rey shrugs. She supposes it’s possible, but she’s also fairly sure both of them are more comfortable _not_ being Emperor and Empress Ren.

 

 

* * *

There is, on Coruscant, an absurdly expensive neighborhood filled with light, trees, soft breezes, and an unobstructed view of the sky. The people who live in this neighborhood are so ridiculously wealthy that they have long since forgotten the idea that things have prices.

Of course, the things they buy and do are expensive, that’s just the way of it, but… It’s certainly not anything they pay attention to. They have personal finance departments to make that all work out.

No, this is the world beyond wealth, into _status._ This is the world of who knows, and gets along with, and _owes_ (again, not in the plebian sense of credits) whom. This is a world of favors, and trades of position and influence.

This is the world Mirina Frakes lives in. And this is a world that takes note when, for the first time in decades her atelier closes for a few days, so that she, personally, can attend to an event on the _Supremacy_ in order to dress a Lady.

Numerous other people who live in this neighborhood have also been invited to this event. Many of them weren’t interested in going, until they saw that Madam Frakes was. If _she_ attends, well, then…

Obviously, something _interesting_ is about to happen out there. 


	60. Details

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently, I'm feeling eager to get this one out. ;)

12/26/1

 

He asked for a dossier on the people attending this, and he’s got one.

Kylo is sitting at his desk, staring at one of the data pads, this one filled with the details that Threepio decided he needed to know about everyone attending this thing.

It’s… comprehensive. That’s likely the best word for this.

Impossible might be another good one.

He figures that if he really works at it, and drops everything else he’s got to do, he could likely get each name memorized along with what planet, system, or corporation each of those names goes with, and which face goes along with those names and organizations, and what their primary interest may be with the Order.

There is no possible way he’s going to memorize anything else. Not in the time he has left.

Especially not if, and he looks at the stack of other datapads on his desk, he attempts to do any of his other jobs.

Kylo sighs, grits his teeth, and then goes and finds the seating chart. He pulls up the dossiers on the people they’re sitting with. Ten people at their table, and four of them are him and Rey, and the Kinears. That leaves six dossiers he’s got to memorize.

Not as much as he was hoping to have, but realistically, what he can do.

He copies them, sends them to Rey, and then gets reading.

 

 

* * *

“So…” Kylo leads as he puts dinner down on the table.

Rey shrugs a bit. “It didn’t hurt.”

He’s looking at her, as she puts cups of water on the table. “Doesn’t look like you enjoyed it.”

She doesn’t roll her eyes, but she wants to. “The dress is very pretty. They tell me I am, too.”

He kisses her. “They’re not wrong.”

She looks at the plates in front of them, and turns to reach for forks.

Kylo shakes his head, and lays chopsticks on each plate. “I was just getting ready to come home when Jon found me with these. Apparently, Threepio and Ellie Kinear have spent all day today going over the menu, the catering, who’s eating what, when, and where, and came to the conclusion that this is a fairly complicated meal with a lot of utensils. Then they talked to each other for a moment, and made the decision to serve it Mid-Rim style, because we’d master chopsticks a lot faster than we’d get the details of what fork to use when.”

Rey picks up the chopsticks. She’s seen the Canto Bight kids use them, but she never has herself. “So… We just… stab the food with it? And what do we do with soup?”

 

 

“I’ve been told there will be spoons. Everything will be cut to bite sized, and we just,” he picks up his sticks, takes a moment getting them into his hand correctly, “pick up,” he manages to grab a green bean, “our food,” and it goes skittering out from between the sticks, “with them.”

Rey gets the sticks in her hand, and eyes the food, and successfully manages to get a bite of mukloo squash into her mouth on the third try. “I think it’d be easier to just stab the food.”

“You’re probably right.” Kylo’s eyeing the noodles under and around the veggies. “Supposedly you can use these to eat noodles.”

“I’ve seen the kids do it.”

“How?”

Rey picks up the bowl, and does her best imitation of the kids slorping up noodles. That works… okay… enough. Then a horrified mental image of doing that, while wearing her dress springs to mind. When she puts the bowl back, she says, “There aren’t any noodles on the menu, are there?”

“Not that I know of.” Having seen her do that, he’s pretty sure Threepio wouldn’t do that to them. He’s certain he can get the hang of these things in time. He’s also certain that he cannot slorp up noodles in any way that’s even resembling polite or elegant.

That said, he also hasn’t successfully gotten any food into his mouth, yet, so…

They double down, working on it, and after ten minutes of very few bites of food successfully getting into either of their mouths, Rey has an idea.

She gets the library out, goes looking through it, and… There’s a video of how to use chopsticks.

And while it’s true neither of them are _good_ at it by the end of the meal, it’s also true that they are managing to successfully feed themselves.

 

 

* * *

12/27/1

 

Kylo doesn’t think he’s spent this long working on… anything… well, this sort of anything, obviously he’s trained long and hard, but some sort of written thing… he’s never spent this sort of time or energy on something like this. But his First Year Speech is _done._ Or, at least, it’s as done as he’s going to get it.

He gives the “finished” draft to Rey first. She reads it, smiles, nods, and says, “It’s good, Kylo.”

“Really?”

She grins at him. “Really.”

 

 

 

* * *

Jon’s staring at a fully revamped seating chart for his dinner. Threepio’s looking… well, exactly like he always does, but even this quickly into their working relationship, he can feel the droid is pleased.

“It was almost a disaster, a full on disaster. You had the F’ranor delegation next to the Polonians, and they’ve been at war with each other, on and off, for the last hundred years… Your caterers had planned thanen for the second course, and yes, I know they’re delicacies in half of the galaxy, but they’re also forbidden by three separate faiths, Concordance of the Stars among them, and you’ve got their Grand Bishop attending this. I was able to make sure that anyone sitting at his table is getting something else, and…”

Jon’s very pleased to see this going so well. It’s the kind of details he knows exists, but there was just no way for him to even begin to take care of them. Threepio’s a good half hour into the catastrophes he’s averted with his keen eye for details, and Jon’s glad of them, but mostly he’s just sitting here feeling pleased about all the ways this isn’t about to blow up in his face.

“Threepio?”

“Yes, Lt. Colonel Frakes.”

“Do you want a uniform? Or something to show off your rank?”

“Lt. Colonel Frakes?”

“You’re invited to this, too. You know that, right? I understand you can’t eat, but…”

“You want me to attend?” He’s never attended something like this before, other than to hover in the back and occasionally whisper something useful in Leia’s ear.

“Of course. Attend. Mingle. Talk. Watch. Learn. Help me put out fires before they start. Do you want… If not an outfit, something to show off your rank? A mark of office or alliance?”

Threepio thinks about that for a long minute, and then he says. “I can’t see a uniform, or changing my appearance. However… There’s someone I’d like to invite.”

“Certainly.”

There’s a somewhat less than perfectly professional lilt in Threepio’s voice as he says, “He’s an R2 unit, and I can’t wait to have him see people take orders from me.”

“An old friend?”

“Something like that.”

 

 

* * *

Kylo growls, quietly, when he sees that two of the dossiers he managed to get memorized now belong to people he’s not having supper with.

He pulls up the new ones and gets to it.

 

 

* * *

“What’s on your hands?” Kylo asks as they get ready for bed that night.

Rey shakes her head, eyes narrowing as she looks at the mitts on her hands. “Mirina says I’m supposed to rub some sort of goop on my fingers every night and then wear gloves to bed.”

Kylo’s just staring at the mitts. They’re bright pink and somewhat fluffy. “Why?”

Rey viciously rolls her eyes. “Apparently, there’s stuff that takes nail lacquer off, and if you don’t use it, and just let the lacquer chip off, it rips up your nails and makes them rough and unhappy, and apparently, this is the sort of thing that’s supposed to help them get smooth and happy again.”

Left unspoken is the fact that if she’s got rough, unhappy fingernails and cuticles (and as of yesterday Rey didn’t even know what a cuticle was, let alone that they’re supposed to be perfectly smooth) people will look, and judge, and _talk._ And it _just wouldn’t do_ for the Master’s Lady to have rough, unhappy cuticles and fingernails.

 

 

Kylo stares at them, rolling his lips together, and nods, slowly. Then an idea bounds through his head and he pounces onto the bed straddling her, stretching her hands above her head. He kisses each wrist, saying, “Thank you for putting up with this.” Meaning things like extra fittings and all of the ‘getting ready’ stuff he knows Mirina and Tasha are shoveling on her.

Then a huge grin lights his face. “You can’t use your hands.” He lets go, but his Force is still holding them down.

Rey tests his hold, wriggling a bit, not entirely sure if she likes this, but she also knows he’ll let her go if it’s an issue. Then she feels the tension on her wrists slip, and he cocks his head a bit to the side, asking if it’s okay.

She nods, and the pressure returns. And with it the feel of his lips against her wrist.

Maybe, just possibly, there’s something to be said for not being able to use your hands. At least, Rey appeared to have thought so, and Kylo’s very much hoping to find out for himself sometime in the not wildly distant future.

 

* * *

12/28/1

 

“Welcome aboard the _Supremacy_ Lord and Lady Xanqlath. I trust your voyage was uneventful, and I hope it was pleasant…”

Jon hovers in the background watching one of his hand-picked First Lieutenants gladhand the latest of the guests. He has over a thousand of them, each one assigned to handful of delegations, doing nothing but getting them settled, making sure they are comfortable, answering questions about The Order, what it does, what it could be doing for them, leading them around on tours, and all in all, making sure they have a “good” time.

If this works, it’ll be a raging success. If it works, it will give off the impression that they are so flush, and well-appointed, and rolling in money and resources that they can afford to appoint officers just to take care of the comforts of guests. If it works, it looks like they’ve got the funds to also host, in comfort and some level of luxury, more than ten thousand people for more than a week if need be.

If it works…

Every officer below the rank of Captain who could memorize an in depth history of the Order in six weeks, look _good_ in a uniform, with a high level of charm and empathy, and could learn, on his feet, enough about each of the guests he was in charge of to not mortally insult them, got dragooned into this. And about two hundred non-coms and three hundred enlisted also got a very sudden bump in rank when it became clear he desperately needed more people for this.

As of right now, three days into people arriving, it’s still going… Well enough. Being able to fob a lot of the protocol issues onto Threepio means Jon’s actually getting some sleep, and from what he’s being told, they are starting to get inquiries into The Order’s ability to host ‘delicate’ gatherings in need of discretion and security.

Jon rubs his eyes. He’s really got to find someone to put in charge of that. He’s building… the eventual Court of Ren… and one day… He can see it, a sparkling place where people gather to work together, with each other, with the wider galaxy… A place of learning and tolerance and… Order. Not too many rules, but the ones that are there are there for the safety of everyone involved and… And he really needs to get a few weeks to just write and sketch and that should happen shortly after the universe burns out because he’s still beyond overscheduled.

Jon sighs. Tomorrow night. Once it’s time to start getting ready, he’s got a few hours of nothing much to do. Keep Kylo in line, and out of his Mom’s hair so the girls can get ready, and make sure he doesn’t have some sort of nervous pre-party melt down.

And then there’s a party, and he’s intending to fucking _party._

 

 

* * *

Kylo gives the text to Jon next. He reads it, smirks a little, and then looks up at Kylo. “Long live Master Ren.”

It’s actually rather nice to have someone say that to him, and not have to be choking the life out of him to get it.

“That said, let’s polish it up,” Jon adds.

And then they spend an hour working on word choice, meter, and _how_ to say some of it.

 

 

 

* * *

“Uh…” Kylo’s staring at the green goop on Rey’s face, neck, shoulders, chest, and back, as they are, once again, getting ready for bed.

She just glares at him and tosses the tube in his direction. “I’ve been told you’re supposed to use it, too. It’s _supposed_ to make your skin look nice.”

“How?”

She glares at him again.

He nods and unscrews the top, sniffs at it, it’s got a scent he’d call minty, but not quite. He pulls his hair back into a bun, and goes about rubbing it on his skin. It’s sort of tingly, and he’s not exactly loving how it feels when it dries, but… “The mitts were more fun.”

“No shit.” _I did not sign up for this_ is radiating off of Rey. Though the fact he’s doing it, too, helps.

The fact that those stupid bloody pimples are _gone_ in the morning helps, too.

Poe looking at her during a quiet moment when the kids are studying, inclining his head a bit, smirking and saying, “Looks like you had a good morning…”

Which, well, is true, at least in the way he means _good morning,_ but that’s usually true so… She raises an eyebrow.

“You’re glowing. Like… I mean…” And it’s clear he’s starting to feel a little embarrassed because he’s apparently read the situation wrong. “Your skin is really… bright. Uh… It’s pretty.” That helps, too.

And maybe the little voice that thinks this is appallingly stupid isn’t dead, but it’s getting quieter.

 

 

* * *

12/29/1

 

“Hey, Rose.”

Rose looks up from the snow plow they’re trying to get attached to the earthmover. Snow is great. Snow is fun. Snow’s awesome, for about two days. And now, snow is starting to be a massive pain in the ass because they’re getting about 10 centimeters a day, and at first that was fine, but it’s over knee high on the adults now, and just slogging through it isn’t working. Plus, for the littlest kids, that’s hip high, and…

Time to get something better than a shovel.

Rey sidles over next to her, eyeing what she’s up to. “Here,” she holds two of the shock absorbers in place, and Rose gets to welding.

“What’s up? Or did Finn find you and tell you I needed some extra hands?”

“Something about someone ‘who knows what those damned machines like,’” Rey says. “Also…” she’s more than a little nervous asking, but… “You know I’ve got that… thing… coming up.”

“Thing?” Rose sits back from the plow, flipping her welding face shield up. With a raised eyebrow, Rose says, “You’re calling it a thing?”

Rey rolls her eyes. “The dinner.”

“Yeah. I know you’ve got it.” Rose doesn’t exactly sound enthusiastic about this. “Why?”

“Uh… apparently getting ready for it is a big deal, and takes time, and… They asked if I wanted a friend to come with me, and… Uh… If you go, they’ll sketch a dress for you for our plan to run Canto Bight, so…”

“Who’s ‘they?’”

“Tasha and Mirina. Jon’s… You don’t know Jon… Uh… The dress designer and her daughter.”

Rose’s eyes narrow a little. She’s not exactly comfortable with this, because if it were solely up to Finn, she’d never get within a light year of anything even remotely related to the Order. And she’s not exactly disagreeing with him on that. And, she’s also not exactly a huge fan of rich people flouncing around with their piles of money. Which ‘dress designer’ sounds a whole lot like.

But Rey is standing there, not looking at Rose, chewing on her lip, which is apparently a gesture she got from Kylo. “Are you nervous?” Rose asks.

Rey nods. “Very. I… don’t know how to do this. I’m learning, but…”

“You think I do?” The idea of which stuns Rose.

“No… But… It’s supposed to be fun and… maybe it would be fun with you. Getting ready for your wedding was fun, and this would be like that, probably. I hope.”

Rose sighs. Getting ready for her wedding was fun, but she’s fairly sure that had a lot to do with the people doing it, and not so much with what they were doing. “Can Paige come?”

“Yes. And…” Rey leaps on a way to sell this idea to Rose. “We can call it reconnaissance. We’re… learning how to blend in at Canto. Poe keeps telling us that we need to be able to do that to convincingly join the high stakes tables, so…”

“Are we still going to do that?” Rose looks toward the chapel, where earlier this morning Kylo was teaching his fourth lightsaber class. “He could just… get us what we need, right?”

“Yes. He’d like to do it, too. If I let him, we’d have a corps of engineers and a fleet of builders and the week after next we’d be set. But…” She half smiles. “Doing it for myself, for us… matters to me.”

Rose smiles at that. “That I understand.”

“And… I think he’s looking forward to it, going to Canto Bight to play, too.”

This was something Rose had never considered. “He’s going to go?”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“Okay, beyond attempting to get him and Finn in the same place for hours at a time… He sets foot in a casino and—“

“Trust me, no one is going to recognize Ben and Rey Amidala out for a good night with their friends the Ticos and Poe Dameron.”

Rose shakes her head and puts the welding torch down. “He really… plays… relaxes… does fun stuff?”

“He really does.”

“And drags you along to things like the dinner.”

“Drags is too strong. I…” She’s biting her lip again. “It matters, right?”

“Does it?” Rose is staring at her. “No… banthashit… No you’ll hurt him if you tell it true. No he-wants-something-and-you-don’t. Does it matter? Really?”

Rey twists her hands together. “I didn’t join the Resistance for the politics; you know that. I… actually… couldn’t really tell you what, other than being against the First Order, the Resistance was for. Jakku… All I grew up with was grab what you could take, and hope no one bigger grabbed it from you. All I could tell you about the Empire or the New Republic was based on the wrecks that were scattered around. It was just… I found a droid, and it needed to get to the Resistance. A guy showed up, and he claimed he was with the Resistance, and I ran away with him, and the guys chasing us were with the First Order and…

“And… All of this… politics stuff comes from _after_ he was part of my life. But… I think if he hadn’t been there, if I’d been pulling this out of a vacuum, it’d matter. I’d approve of it. Threepio says this is good. That he doesn’t like Kylo, but what he’s doing is good, so…

“So, it matters, right? I mean… we killed people to make a better galaxy, so… I should be willing to live…” But he’s not asking her to _live_ for it. “Hell, put a fucking dress on and do my hair… for that, too, right?”

Rose doesn’t say anything; she’s just watching Rey.

“And… He’s met me more than halfway on anything I’ve even hinted about wanting.” She gestures to their settlement. “He’s never pushed about giving me anything. He doesn’t comment about it being small or shoddy or… Or he’s there, squeezing an hour or so out of everything else he’s got to be doing so he can be working with the kids, and… We weren’t even… A thing, yet. Just… talking really, and I mention freeing slaves, and boom, he’s on it. He doesn’t always do it the way I expect, but… He does it. He’s been meeting me in the gray for years now, and… I should meet him, too, right?”

Rose sighs. She pushes the tangle of hair that got caught in the wind out of her face. “Part of me… The part that sees Finn tense up every time he catches Ren out of the corner of his eye, wants to tell you, ‘No. You go on being exactly you. Don’t compromise an inch. Don’t change. Don’t grow. Stay exactly the way you are. Don’t make yourself do anything even slightly uncomfortable for this man, because he’s not worth it.’” She bites her lip. “But that’s shit advice. He’s your man? Your love?”

“My love. My dark. My husband. My other self.”

“If that’s true. And, look… It’s okay if it’s not. You don’t have to stick with a guy forever just ‘cause you were with him once, or just because _now_ is good. But, if this is true, if it’s real, if it’s _forever,_ if this man is your _husband,_ then you can’t take a centimeter more than you’re willing to give. Not if it’s going to work. Not if you’re going to be together for the long run and not resent each other. And it sounds like you’ve been doing a lot of taking, and… And that’s what it’s about, you support him and he supports you, and you find a goal and move together toward it, and… And if that goal means you’ve got to dress up and go to parties to get where you need to go, then you dress the fuck up and you go to the damn parties, and you make the galaxy bend to you, and not the other way around.”

Rey nods. She looks at her friend. “So… wanna come and help me do this? And probably get the start of a beyond awesome, make Finn’s jaw drop to the floor and forget his own name, dress out of it?”

“Yeah.” Rose flashes her a little smile. “I’ll admit. I am kind of curious to see what his place looks like.”

Rey shakes her head a bit. “It’s black.”

“Oh, I’m so shocked. Really?” She couldn’t sound less shocked if she tried.

“He tells me it was that way when he got there, but the things he’s added since have also been black.”

“What did he add?”

“A small pool and a dining table and chairs.”

“Why a pool?”

“He likes to float around from time to time. And, a bath time after dinner is fun, you know?”

“Oh.” Rose shakes her head again. “Getting used to _him_ being a person is going to be weird.”

“Tell me about it. I just about swallowed my tongue the first time I saw him in a bathrobe.”

“When was that…” And, for the first time, Rey starts to talk to one of her friends about how, in detail, she and Kylo became what they are now.

 

* * *

Walking home from that, Rey thinks about what Rose said about forever. About Kylo being her husband. About setting a goal and moving toward it together.

She knows that Kylo has promises he’s made to her. Promises that he’s made to himself, and to their future. She knows that that’s how he’s defined their marriage in his mind.

But, as of now, Rey hasn’t done that. She’s spent so much time thinking about what everything else means, that being a _wife_ hasn’t gotten a lot of thought. It’s something she does, not something she thinks about.

And maybe that’s time to change. Maybe that needs some defining before she can be a… Whatever it is. The Not-Emperor’s Not-Empress.

Before she can really be Lady Ren.

She remembers Jon saying to her, ‘He’s laying a galaxy at your feet, so pick the damn thing up and help him carry it.’

She’s just inside their home, having pulled off her coat, and squeezes her left hand, feeling her wedding band digging into her fingers. And in that moment, makes the first of her promises, to herself, about being Lady Ren.

_I will carry your burdens with you._

 

__

 

 

* * *

Kinear gets the third version of the speech. After Jon and Kylo spent an hour on edits, and Kylo spent another two hours after that. He reads it quickly, and then puts it down. His eyes are serious, but alight.

“That’s what I needed.”

 

 

Kylo raises an eyebrow.

“You told me peace, and that you wanted people to join us, and ground was just dust, and I said I’d get you a map. Peace is vague and nebulous. It means different things to different people. People joining us… Who knows how that works? And what’s supposed to happen with us doing that? What are the ramifications and how is the rest of the galaxy supposed to react.” He taps the pad with Kylo’s speech on it. “This…” he grins, “this is concrete, and I’ll build you the best fucking map you’ve ever seen to get to _this._ ”

Kylo smiles back. “Good. Where next, Grand Marshall Kinear?”

“Next, lad…” He grins. “Next, we’ve got a party.”

 

 

* * *

12/30/1

 

“Kylo?” Jon’s voice is tentative, which is unusual these days.

Kylo looks up from the speech. It’s “done,” but he doesn’t have the new version memorized, not perfectly, not yet. So he's pacing around his room, glancing at the mirror from time to time, watching himself do it, going over _how_ he’s going to say it.

“Jon?”

“She’s not here, is she?”

He knows the she in question is Rey. “No, back home right now. Why?”

Jon reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small black pouch. “Because I didn’t want any chance of her seeing it, yet.” Then he hands it over to Kylo.

He unknots the drawstring at the mouth, and gently tips the necklace out. He feels his breath go easing out in an impressed whisper.

Jon’s smirking next to him. “I felt that way the first time I held Lance’s wedding ring.”

Kylo can emphasize. It’s not _exactly_ right, because after all, he held Rey’s marriage band, and slipped it onto her, but… This is close.

 

 

He holds it on his palm, imagining it on her neck. The smile across his face is wide. The ring… that was them, as people. As Rey and Kylo. This… He touches the token on his own throat… These are the gift of them as _leaders._

The Order Hexagon with the Maji Spiral twists in his fingers. This is the gift of the Master of the Order to the Mistress of the Maji, and the first sign of what will eventually be The Order of the Maji.

The rings were their private lives. And this… this is the start of what he’s hoping is going to be a grand, and public, adventure.

“It’s perfect, Jon.” He spends another moment holding it, before gently tucking it back into the bag.

Jon nods. “Good.”

 

 

* * *

“Lt. Colonel Frakes! Lt. Colonel!”

“Threepio?”

“It’s a catastrophe! A catastrophe, sir.”

Jon feels his stomach drop. “What?”

“The flowers. I was with Lady Kinear, and her florist has brought in the final component of the main centerpiece and…”

“What’s wrong with it?” Jon feels ice shooting down his back, and tries to vanish it. As his mom says, it’s not a wedding until at least one thing has gone horribly wrong.

“Cyananthias Lilies.”

Jon doesn’t know what they are.

“It’s a water installation, with a seven tiered fountain, gently trickling over the different spheres and bowls…” That part sounds fine. He’s been watching them build that for days. “And the gralla fish are frolicking around in the bigger spheres…” Still sounds fine. They were flitting about when he was last in what used to be the throne room, and he’s taken to thinking of as the courtyard now. Supposedly, they’re ‘acclimated’ now. “But the bottom pool is dotted with Cyananthias lilies, which are extremely toxic to K’runias, Hrellians, and Jakards.”

Frakes winces. “All of whom we have attending?”

“All of whom we have attending.”

“Toxic in the sense that they shouldn’t eat them?”

“Toxic in the sense that if any of them set foot into the throne room they’ll die within half an hour.”

Jon decides that, this in fact, is worth whimpering out loud for. “And if we throw the installation out?”

“No centerpiece, an extremely irate florist, and we’ll have to pay for it, because it won’t be free advertising.”

“How much?’

“One hundred and fifty-seven thousand—“

“Don’t tell me.” Jon’s shoulders slump. He’s got… “Let me guess, the throne room is already contaminated and even if we remove the flower, and if we let them in, they’ll die?”

“Or at least get horrifically ill.”

Jon’s looking for a convenient chunk of wall to bang his head against, when he hears some sort of beeping going on next to Threepio.

“I suppose we could…” More beeping. “Maybe…” A few more beeps. “I’ll ask. Lt. Colonel, my colleague, R2-D2” Jon feels mildly put out to be dealing with another droid, but… Maybe this one has an answer that won’t cost him the next three years of his wages and then some. “Suggests that we use our field generating technology to build a static containment field around the installation. Then allow a few, small, holes in the airlock, so the atmosphere in the throne room can be gently evacuated without disturbing everything in there, then reseal it, and refill it.”

Jon blinks. “We… can… Probably do that. Let me go find…”

And he’s two steps toward hunting down an engineer before he turns on his heel to say, “Thank you… R2?” He’s not sure if that’s the droid’s name or not. “If that idea works, you’re a literal lifesaver!”

R2 twists his visor and beeps at him.

“He says you’re welcome,” Threepio adds.

As he’s leaving the room, looking for someone who specializes in containment fields, Jon hears, “Yes, he is very polite,” followed by a lot more beeping, and more quietly, “No, I don’t know where Master Ren found him.” More beeping. “Well, I suppose we can hope it rubs off on him.”

 

 

* * *

“C8, who is Jamisin Relth?” Kylo asks, looking at his schedule for the day. In ten minutes, he’s got an hour blocked off, and no idea what’s supposed to happen during it.

“I believe he’s a barber.”

Kylo blinks.

“Lt. Colonel Frakes set it up.”

Kylo holds up his hands and just nods. “Okay.”

An hour later, his hair is two centimeters shorter, he’s been shaved more thoroughly than he thought was physically possible (Rey’s laser device means he only has to shave his face once a week or so, but apparently he had nose and ear hair, something that he’d never noticed before, but is no longer in possession of), every eyebrow hair that strayed outside of some magically divined appropriate zone had been ripped off, and the rest of them have been tidied up and trimmed, and he’s got a jar full of _stuff,_ like the green paste (though this one is bluish-gray) they put on their skin, but he’s supposed to put in his hair, and just let sit there for ten or so minutes before he does his usual wash.

He hopes Rey will find that amusing.

 

* * *

 

Judging by the way she’s rolling around, laughing, when he comes out of the refresher with his hair slathered in blue-gray goop, piled up on top of his head, towel wrapped around it, and more of the green stuff on his face, she did.

 

 

* * *

12/31/1

 

In the morning, as they’re enjoying their cuddle, she’s petting his hair. “It is softer.” (She’s actually kind of marveling at that, because she didn’t think hair got any softer than Kylo’s already was.)

“Then maybe it wasn’t a complete waste of time.” He kisses her. “Tonight, huh?”

She inhales deep and steadying. “Tonight.”

“It’s going to be good.”

She half-smiles at him. “Tell me that when we’re doing it.”

He kisses her. “I won’t have you. You’ll feel it.”

“I’ll probably want to hear it, too.”

“Then I’ll tell you.”

She rolls over so her back is to his chest, and he wraps his arms around her, kissing her neck and ear.

“You’re a lot calmer about this than normal,” she says. He wasn’t in this good a mood before the last one of these.

“You’re going to be there, with me.” He kisses her ear again, snuggling a little closer, wrapping his body around hers. “Everything’s easier with you.”

She smiles.

He wriggles a bit, arms around her, contentment purring off of him. “You feel it, right? How good it’s going to be?”

She wiggles her butt against his morning stand, full and hot against her. “That’s most of what I’m feeling right now.”

His turn to grin. “That’s going to be good, too.”

“You promise?”

His hand is already trailing down her front, nestling in between her legs. “Oh, yeah,” he breathes it against her ear. “So, good.”

That breath lights goosebumps along her neck. His teeth gently ghosting against her skin makes her shiver, and the little lick that follows has her arching her hips back into him.

“So, good…” He says it again, his voice rumbling against her shoulder and neck, his hand cupping her maomao, palm pressing against her pearl as he rubs against her bum.

She hooks her leg over his, tilting her hips a bit more, shifting up a bit, so he can twist his hips just a little, and thrust just… enough… Both of them shiver at the feel of it.

So good… indeed.

 

 

* * *

Later, after breakfast, she says to him… “I guess, I’ll see you tonight, then?”

He grins at her, and kisses her forehead. “I’ll see you tonight.” And then he’s out of their kitchen, back on his ship, ready for the last day of his first year as the Master of the Order.

 

 


	61. Getting Ready: Kylo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, we've got one NSFW image in this one.

12/31/1

 

Kylo almost doesn’t recognize Jon when he comes, along with his mom and sister, to help get Rey ready. Rationally, Kylo knows that Jon has to have lounging about clothing. In fact, he likely has things like pajamas, and socks, maybe shower sandals, or… just things. He’s not _always_ on duty. That said, Jon in a pair of slim trousers and a button down shirt with the sleeves bunched up above his elbows…  It’s just nothing Kylo ever imagined.

“Come on,” Jon says to Kylo much earlier than Kylo expected him to come and collect him. Apparently, part of this getting ready for the evening thing means he’s being booted out of his own rooms, and, apparently, no, their place on Lirium just won’t cut it, so Jon’s grabbing him and…

He’s got no idea.

That’s not true. He chooses to have no idea. About three minutes worth of focus would get him all the idea he could possibly want on the subject of how and why and what is supposed to be happening.

“Why now?” Kylo asks, deciding to get some clue.

“So you don’t just sit in your office and hover, tracking what they’re up to on the other side of that door.”

Kylo glares, but there’s no heat in it, because that’s pretty much _exactly_ what he was going to do.

 

 

* * *

Kylo rarely thinks about the scale of the _Supremacy,_ but when it hits him that it’s an eleven minute elevator ride, followed by a five minute walk, and a seventeen minute tram ride to get to the wing of the ship where Jon’s rooms are, it’s really hammering home exactly how much territory he’s got just _here._

“What’s the final count?”

“Guests or Order?”

“Both?”

“Four point two million of us on the _Supremacy._ Ten thousand, six hundred and five guests.”

“We’re at… Twenty-two percent of capacity here?”

“Something like that.”

Kylo nods. “Full house next year?”

Jon smiles. “With any luck.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“What is that?” Kylo asks a few moments after they get to Jon’s rooms. He’s just sort of pacing around, not sure what to do with himself, suddenly very aware of the fact that he’s supposed to get dressed up and deal with more than five hundred strangers tonight.

Apparently, Jon has decided that this is not what he wants Kylo to be doing, so he’s got… a solution.

“It’s vodka.”

Kylo gives Jon a look to indicate, in that he saw the man pour it, that he was not, _literally_ asking what it was. “That part I gathered from the bottle. Why are you giving it to me?” (Though, given how they got here, and the whole, there’s a massive party thing tonight hit, and since he’s not keeping Rey in a calm or positive mood about it, his own nerves started to frazzle, so he started to pace around Jon’s rooms, jittering slightly with his hands, it’s possible that he knows why Jon just poured both of them a drink.)

“Because we’re still four hours out, you aren’t even dressed yet, and you’re pacing around, nervous, and it’s only going to get worse. That’s reason one.” Jon shoots his drink back, and holds out Kylo’s glass, which is much less-filled toward him. “Reason two, you don’t like glad-handing assholes, and if I had to guess it’s because it makes you feel nervous and uncomfortable. Alcohol is a traditional remedy for that sensation.”

Kylo glares at the glass. It’s stupidly tiny. He’s got no idea why anyone would want a glass that barely holds three swallows of liquid. “I don’t like how it tastes, and I don’t generally like how it makes me feel.”

“So you do drink?”

“Rarely. Four times. Three of them were fun while I was doing it. Two of them made me wish I was dead after. The most recent two times were nice, but…” He eyes the glass. “I’m wary.”

Jon sighs. “It’s vodka, Kylo, it doesn’t taste like anything, and this is 20 milliliters. At your size this should make you feel just a bit calmer and a touch more mellow. If it does more than that, it’ll be out of your system long before we get to the party. This is us, experimenting, seeing if we can find a way to make this more pleasant for you. You want everything to be soft and easy for Rey. Well, I’m aiming for you to have as good of a time as you can, so…” Jon gestures with the ridiculously tiny glass in his hand.

Kylo rolls his eyes but does take it, drink it, fast, and then chokes. “You said it didn’t taste like anything.”

“It doesn’t.”

“It tastes like fucking alcohol.”

Jon rubs his eyes. “Were you ever a teenager? Yes, alcohol tastes like alcohol. And this is sixty percent alcohol and the rest is water. That’s not what people mean when they say it doesn’t taste like anything.”

Kylo sighs, and sits down in Jon’s living area, watches Jon’s fish flit around in their bowl for a few moments, and then says, “I was twenty-three the first time I had a drink with alcohol in it. My knights and I split a bottle of Corellian Whiskey. I didn’t like the way it tasted. I didn’t like the way being drunk felt. I really didn’t like the dream/visions that went with it. And waking up the next morning did nothing to disabuse me of the idea that alcohol and I weren’t meant to be good friends.”

Jon sits next to him. “So, I guess the answer is, no you really didn’t get to be a teenager?”

“Probably not on any level you’re thinking of.”

“First kiss?”

Technically, he was twenty-six the first time he kissed someone, but since that was three years after his first visit to the pleasure specialists, and he knows what Jon’s actually asking, he answers, “Twenty-three.”

Jon doesn’t wince, but it’s close.

“First dance?”

“A few months ago. Unless you want to count a wedding I went to when I was seven, or the one dance we tried to have at Luke’s school where I stayed glued to the wall and didn’t move the entire half hour it was going on before he shut it down.”

“Those don’t count. First party?”

“Again, either being seven at a wedding, for the first Order shindig.”

“Okay, so at some point we have to figure out how to get you to a real party, because these aren’t real parties. If for no other reason than so you can figure out how to actually have a good time at your own wedding.”

Kylo smirks a little. “I think I can figure that out.”

“Good.”

Kylo looks around Jon’s rooms. “So… You got to be a teenager and went to a lot of parties.”

Jon smiles, pours himself a full shot, and takes it. “And had a splendid time doing it.”

 

 

Kylo waits, and waits for another beat before saying, “How does that work?”

“How do you mean?”

“Pretend that I’m some strange alien who somehow got to the age of almost thirty-two without ever actually attending a real party. How does it work?”

Jon snerks. “Uh… Okay… So, first off, for me, I’d be somewhere between a guest and staff at these things. Mom doesn’t much like traveling, so she doesn’t go off world. But a lot of our clients are off world, and they want last minute fittings and whatnot.”

“So… she sends, what, sixteen-year-old you off to do that?”

“Yep, and fourteen-year-old me, and eighteen-year-old me, and twenty-year-old me. I was twenty-four when the First Order got to Coruscant, and my career path radically changed.”

“Why didn’t you just set up your own shop?”

“Speaking of aliens… No credits, no tools of my own, no materials, no _shop_ , no name, no brand… Unless I wanted to apprentice with another designer, oh, and by the way, I can’t use any of mom’s looks, and again, dressmaking is something _men don’t do_ on Coruscant… So, Mum notices the First Order is recruiting, and gives me the ‘it’s time to get out,’ speech. Well… the First Order wanted armor designers, and I figured it wouldn’t be _that_ different… And next thing I knew I was on the _Supremacy_ putting an armor assembly line into order.”

Kylo nods. “So, you just… go to these things?”

“Not exactly. I always went with one of my sisters. A lot of people aren’t comfortable with a man dressing the bride. But, I’m just as good with a needle and thread, and last minute jobs are quicker with two sets of hands, so…”

“So, you go, you measure, you… fit…”

Jon’s nodding. “And some of these weddings are three or four days long, with multiple outfits, but… Really, that’s not _all_ that much work. Fix a bead here, snip a thread there, do a last minute seam re-stich, hope the bride didn’t gain five kilos in the three weeks between the “last fitting” and the wedding. _That_ was a bitch to work out right, had to remake the damn thing almost from scratch. Mostly, though, the months before the wedding can be hour after hour of nitpicky banthashit and fine sewing until your eyes fall out, but once you’re at the party, it’s fairly light.

“Eventually, the bride goes to wherever the wedding is. They do their thing. Maybe she changes into a new dress, and then party time. These people want my mom happy, so, we get ‘guest’ status, real food, nice seats, all the alcohol we can drink as long as we stay sober enough to sew, a good hotel room, or suite, and… Well, I’m pretty enough, look good in a suit, especially one I made myself, people at weddings tend to be in a romantic sort of mood, and I had a _lot_ of fun with a lot of very pretty people.”

Kylo eyes Jon’s drink. “Something you’re hoping for tonight.”

Jon smiles a bit at that, too. “I certainly won’t mind if it happens. It’s been… longer than I like to go… And well, there’s going to be a lot of attractive women and at least a few attractive men hoping to get you into bed tonight, and when they fail miserably, I might decide to console them.”

Kylo’s laughs. “A few? Speaking of teenagers…”

“Like I said, it’s been _longer_ than I like to go. _Someone’s_ been keeping me up at night, and not in a fun way. Which means something else _hasn’t_ been up at night, and it’s about time I do something to remedy that. As much as I possibly can.”

Kylo laughs at that, too.

Jon settles back against his sofa, hands laced behind his head. “There are perks to being the guy who designed the layout. I know every blind corner in this set up, and… okay, back up, this is something you _do not_ get to do tonight. And this is absolutely not me suggesting you try this. This is _my_ plan for the evening, and you _don’t get to copy it_. You’re the host, which means you cannot leave for ten to fifteen minutes in order to have a good time. You don’t get to do this until you’re a guest at one of these things. I’m not the host, so no one cares what I’m up to, and I’m going to use every fucking one of those blind corners, because there’s literally nothing in the universe that feels like getting your shaft sucked by someone in perfect formalwear so close to the party you can still hear it, knowing that any second someone could come around the corner and catch you. And I’ve _beyond_ earned it.”

Kylo laughs at that. “Alley. Not a blind corner, and… well, if you can pick your partner up…” He sniggers a bit more. “That was fun.”

Jon’s grinning. “Oh, I’ll bet. Anyway, you don’t get to do that tonight. Not as the host.”

“And how do I go about getting myself and Rey invited to one of these things, as guests…”

Jon laughs at that. “Give it time. By the end of this, there’ll be people hoping to get the Master to show up on their home territory just for the status of having said he was there. But… Make sure you’ve scouted the territory before you drag Rey off into what you think is a blind corner. There are three in the setup here that really are blind, five that are wired for sound and video that only look blind. Anywhere you go will likely be set the same way.”

Kylo doesn’t exactly pout, but that is putting something of a damper on any potential plans he might have for blind corners. They sit there quiet for a while, before Kylo says, “How do you get them to do it?”

Jon blinks. “Uh…”

“You don’t just walk up and tell them to suck you off, right?”

“Generally, no.”

“Generally?” Kylo can’t stop the disbelieving lilt of his voice.

“It’s really not going to be that kind of party.”

Which would be the first time that Kylo’s ever contemplated parties where that sort of thing _might_ happen. “What the hell kind of parties have you been to?”

“ _Weddings,_ which are giant fertility rituals in a lot of cultures.” His look fills in a lot of the rest of the blanks for Kylo. “I was… gods… seventeen, eighteen… And… There was this one… Okay, everyone who gets tuffed puts a coin in the bride’s purse, one coin each time, and if she can still lift it at the end of the night, the wedding was a failure.”

“Where was that?”

“K’riniar.”

“Why have I never heard of this place?”

“Because you were raised in a culture that hates fun.”

“Apparently.” Kylo eyes the bottle. He can feel it. This is working. He is looser, his muscles, his mind, and he’s feeling a sort of pleasant goofiness. “I still don’t know how it works. How do you get a stranger to suck you off?”

“Is Rey the only…”

“No. I… saw the Pleasure Specialists a few times, and... I mean, I know how to get them to do it. And once I was Supreme Leader, I had officers more or less throwing themselves at me, and took advantage of it a few times. I can read minds, at least when they’re thinking at me that hard, so with them I didn’t need to ask, I just sort of got in their way, with no one else around, and they just… offered. But… I’ve never just… gone up to someone and asked.”

“It works pretty much like it did with the officers. You’ve got something they want. They’ve got something you want. Usually there’s talking involved while you work that out, and then you find a quiet place and get to it.”

“What did they want from you?”

Jon sighs and shoots Kylo some irked side-eye. “I get you’re not being intentionally insulting, but… wrong question.”

“They wanted me for my power.”

Jon rolls his eyes. They’ve been over this before, but… Given how bad Kylo is at this sort of conversation, practicing may be in order, so Jon turns the topic a bit. “They wanted you for your body. There’s not an officer naïve enough on this ship to think that sex’ll get them anywhere. They wanted you naked.”

“I can read minds and feel emotions. Power. They wanted my power. Status, they wanted to be able to say they’d had me.”

“Yeah, the power between your legs. You look like you’ve got twenty-five centimeters and could fuck someone into next week and back with ‘em, and then flip ‘em over and make them beg for more. I get that somewhere along the lines they beat the ability to appreciate this out of you, but you’ve got a _really_ nice body, very intense eyes, and a _great_ voice. People respond to that.” Before Kylo can say anything, Jon adds, “And if you blush at that, I’ll slap you. Just take it as your due and leave it there.” 

Kylo doesn’t blush. He does chew his lip. Then he says, “Seventeen, eighteen on a _really_ good morning.”

Jon laughs. “Force, if I can get that out of you on 20 mils of vodka, you must be a blast on a full shot.”

Kylo rolls his eyes. “The ones you’re intending to go sweeping through tonight aren’t in this for my body.”

“Only because they haven’t seen you.”

Kylo shakes his head. “You like me too much.”

“No, I like you just enough. If I liked you too much, I’d be in your lap, and this would be awkward as fuck.”

Kylo rubs his forehead. “I have no idea how to respond to that.”

Jon grins at him, and it’s clear that he’s mostly just teasing Kylo. Mostly. The alcohol is hitting him, too, making him a bit more open than he’d normally be. “Generally, something vaguely flirtatious and teasing would be good. Like, for example patting your lap, saying something like ‘hop on,’ and if I tried to up the joke by getting on you, you’d laugh and _gently_ push me away. Or you can shut me down cold. Or you could suddenly develop an interest in my fish.”

Kylo’s eyes flick to the fish. “How long have you had the fish?”

Jon laughs. “Kylo, if you want to do this thing where you get people to join you because they want to, you are going to have to learn how to flirt. Sexual attraction is part of the toolbox of getting people to like you, so you _can’t_ not use it.”

“Rather save it up for Rey.”

“Which is fine. I’m not saying you’ve got to have sex with other people, I’m not even suggesting contemplating it, but you do have to be able to have a light, friendly, suggestive conversation without getting in too deep.”

“Do I look like someone who’s ever, on any level, of anything, had the ability to judge where too deep was and avoid it?”

“No. Which is why we’re going to _learn._ ”

Kylo looks around Jon’s rooms, seeing the picture of him and Lane. His voice is softer as he says, “How do you do this?”

Jon can see what he’s looking at, and how he’s looking. “Speaking of too deep.”

“Sorry. Just…” He’s looking around. “How do you lose something that matters so much and keep going? Let alone… I had to…”

“Had to what?” Jon’ll happily keep this centered on Kylo until the end of time, because right now talking about him is a hell of a lot easier than talking about himself.

“Burn my name, hide my past, kill… everything… Just to keep moving, and… And it didn’t really help all that much.”

Jon swallows. Kylo’s staring at him, eyes wide and dark, and… needing something. “Uh…” He sighs. “I lost… a lot. But… not _everything_. And that makes a difference…” He keeps watching Kylo looking at the pictures of he and Lane. “And… I had someone who loved who I was before I lost almost everything. And, if I let that person go, let him burn to the ground… I was loved, Kylo, cherished, and… I loved him back, loved him more than myself, more than I thought I ever could, and… I didn’t die. And what would it mean, if I killed the man my love loved more than anything else? I couldn’t hurt myself because it would have hurt him. That’s eventually what kept me moving. What kept me from turning my blaster on myself.  

“And, uh… If I just roll up in a ball, and drift through the days, and let myself shrivel away… Everything he loved about me dies. And I can’t do that to him. Maybe… You believe in ghosts and forever and whatnot, but… For me… This is it. Right here, right now. If Lane’s out there somewhere, I can’t find or feel him. All I’ve got of him are memories and pictures. So, when I’m gone,” he nods to the picture, “we are, too. And… I can’t let that happen a minute sooner than absolutely necessary.

“I’ll get tuffed as much as I can tonight, and I’ll enjoy it when it’s happening, because it still feels good, and I’ll miss him, and I’ll wish I was with him. I’ll fuck in corners because I still haven’t been willing to bring someone back to our bed, but… one day it’ll happen.” He looks at his hand, rubbing his thumb against his wedding band. “And that day I’ll wake up, and I’ll miss him, but with any luck, I’ll also feel good about whomever I’m in bed with, because… because it’s part of being alive, and happy, and he wanted that for me.

“That was one of his vows to me, that he’d always put my happiness first. One of my vows to him, too. That we’d share and cherish each other’s joys. And bodies, and pleasure, and fucking… That’s part of it. We… really liked fucking… neither of us were anything approaching celibate before we met, and we just did it more after, and… Yeah… He’d kick my ass if I gave it up.”

Kylo blushes as he gets a feel for some of the thoughts, memories in Jon’s head.

“So… uh… I made my vows, and I can’t betray them by letting myself wallow in misery.” Jon checks the chronometer. Three and a quarter hours to go, and it’s not like they’ve got to start getting dressed anytime soon. He pours himself another drink, and a half shot for Kylo.

Kylo shoots it back, wincing again. “Don’t you have something to put that in that actually tastes good?”

“Floof.”

Kylo rolls his eyes. He intentionally doesn’t use words like that, and especially not around Jon. But… “Takes one to know one, right?”

Jon laughs, long and loud at that. “King of the Floofs.” He’s smiling, watching Kylo for a moment, who is pleased that what he said landed well.

Kylo looks at the glass and the bottle. He gets up, finds Jon’s cooler, and looks around in there for a liquid he actually likes drinking. He’s got some sort of pink liquid. He takes a sniff, some sort of fruit juice';he doesn’t recognize it, but he’s sure it doesn’t taste worse than straight vodka. “Glasses?”

Jon gestures to the shelf below the cooker. Kylo grabs one, pours it mostly full of juice, and then adds a full shot of vodka to it, figuring if he drinks it slow, he can just sort of stay here, feeling pleasantly loose. He taps the rim of the glass with his index finger. “I’ve dealt with more than enough shit for six lifetimes, and I’m done choking down things I hate when I don’t have to.” He take a sip. The juice is some sort of citrus, sourer than he’d pick for himself, but he can’t really taste the vodka. “Better.”

Jon watches him do it, amused, thinking that’s a good way to look at life, and then that amusement fades as he really _watches_ and feels the holes in Kylo’s life and the things they’re talking about.

Jon’s voice is serious as he says, “Who’d you lose, Kylo?”

Kylo’s quiet for a long moment, playing with the glass, before he says, “Myself. Literally on that one, I was born Ben Solo. My hope. My heroes. My parents. My faith. My Lord… My… everything. One after the other after the other. The day I cut Snoke in half was the day there was nothing left.”

Jon nods. “Come on. We’ve got hours, and I’m willing to bet you’ve never actually started at the beginning and just _told_ someone the story.”

“Rey.”

That surprises Jon, and then he thinks about it for a moment. “You _told_ her, or she _felt_ it?”

“There’s a difference?”

“Yeah. I can’t just pull it out of you. You’ve got to think about it and arrange it and put it into context for me. Which means you’ve got to think about it and arrange it and put it into context for you, too. So, talk.”

So, Kylo does, and he tells the story of a boy named Ben, whose parents loved him, and had big dreams for him. And Jon knows all about that, because his mother had _big_ dreams for him. But Ben’s parents didn’t understand him, or worse, did understand him and tried hard, so very hard, to not let him be who he was. And he can feel Jon understand, to a degree, because there was once a boy named Jon, whose mom knew what and who he wanted, and did everything she could to get him attached to a _woman_ , including sending him to a lot a parties he was probably too damn young and immature to handle, in the hopes that maybe some pretty girl would catch more than his eye. (And his older sisters, not nearly as attached to proper _Imperial_ behavior, and sure that their little brother was _vastly_ too young to be trapped into a wedding by a baby, made sure he had an implant before he got his fourteen-year-old self to the first of said parties.)

Kylo talks about how his heroes failed him, and worse, turned on him, and Jon doesn’t have firsthand experience with that, but he’s good with empathy.

He talks about part of joining the First Order was not having anywhere else to go, and Jon knows all about that. And part of it was the idea of stabilizing things, and Jon remembered that, too. And the horror of seeing how none of it was _real,_ and Jon doesn’t know much about that because from where he was, setting up a process line for armor design, spending a lot of long days and nights with the Tactical Design Wing’s Commanding Supervisor, a young Major with dark hair and eyes and an easy smile, he didn’t see much of anything else. 

He talks about what felt like hours of watching those beams of light heading toward the Hosnian system, and how… How there was just nothing he could do. How the Force was supposed to offer calm and quiet and all of those good things they’d learned about in Luke’s school, and yet the most powerful Force user he’d ever seen was in the back of his head, cackling with glee, knowing that billions of people were going to die in an instant, their Force snuffed out. How, standing there, he could remember his lessons about the Force, the giver of all life, the thing that allowed stardust to breathe, and feel, and think. The thing that had the plan, the thing that set everything in motion according to its will. It gave Snoke all of that power and all of that rage and pain and hate and let him throw it around the galaxy, hurting trillions of people because he liked it and… And there were no answers. Nothing to tell him why any of this shit had happened and… And Jon can listen, and look concerned, but he can’t exactly emphasize with Kylo losing whatever was left of his faith, because Jon never had any. He wasn’t raised in any church, and never expected the universe to make any sort of sense.

Kylo lost his dark… He wasn’t expecting that. When he killed Han he felt a little light, one he hadn’t known was still lingering in his mind, go out. And when he killed Snoke, he felt a massive, achingly heavy shadow fall off of him, and he hadn’t known that wasn’t _him._ As long as he had been, that weight had been there, and suddenly it _wasn’t._ And worse, he didn’t know what to do without it. He’d spent his entire life chained to something drowning him, and breaking the chain was great, but that didn’t mean he suddenly knew how to swim.

“You got Rey, right? She was there to—“

Kylo’s inelegant snort stops Jon’s line there. “I lost her that day, too. I couldn’t be kind, light, Jedi Ben. That’s why she was there, to save ‘Ben.’ She didn’t want Kylo, not then, and we fought over the lightsaber, blew it and the throne room up, and she left me unconscious on the floor. I woke up to Hux getting ready to murder me.”

Jon nods slowly. “I woke up to echo of…” He doesn’t have words for that sound. He doesn’t think there are words for that sound. “The feel of the ship jerking, and the ceiling hitting me in the face because our wing lost gravity for two days.”

“And for a second, you didn’t know what was wrong, just that it was?” Kylo asks.

“Yeah. For a second. And a minute. And… three days actually. I didn’t know for sure for three days.”

Kylo winces at that. “Did they… find a body?”

Jon shakes his head. “No. It was three days before they could tell me that the entire section of the ship he’d been in had been completely vaporized. There’s no chance he, or any of them, felt anything. She… hit… as best they can tell, five levels below where the design center was. No one at the impact site felt, or knew, a thing. One second, they were there, and the next they were… Subatomic particles.”

“What’d you do, then?”

Jon lifts the corner of his lips, but it’s not a smile. Up to that point, he’d been hoping that Lane was on the far side of the rip, communications between the sides were sketchy at best, and everyone who could work, was working, full out, on trying to get both sides stabilized and connected to each other. But, on the third day, when they’d gotten both halves more or less together again, and had finally gotten a count of who was still there… Lane wasn’t among them. “Cried a lot, drank a lot, had a long chat with my blaster, drank some more, put the blaster away, cried more, drank more, passed out for a day or so, and then got up with the worst hangover in the history of hangovers, commandeered an empty chunk of the R deck, and rebuilt the Tactical Design Wing.” It’s been long enough, he can say that without crying, but not long enough yet that he can say it without feeling bleak. “What’d you do?” Getting the attention back on Kylo helps. 

Kylo shakes his head a little. He really doesn’t like thinking about what he did those few days. “Made some _appallingly_ bad tactical decisions. Embarrassed the hell out of myself in front of everyone. Let the Resistance escape because Rey and my mother were on the ship, and I could hate both of them more than I’d ever hated anything at that moment, including Snoke, because they were abandoning me, _again_ , but I couldn’t kill them. Got back to the _Supremacy._ Let Hux handle… a lot. Beat my punching bag until it broke. Beat the wall until that broke. Destroyed the weights, the bench, the mirrors, and a big part of the floor with my lightsaber. Debated beating the other wall, but Hux showed up with some stupid shit that had to be dealt with, that he assumed I wasn’t competent to deal with. That he’d picked to show me specifically because he was sure I _couldn’t_ handle it. He was standing there, face, hair, uniform perfect, bored expression on his face, hate and disgust pouring off of him, as he was looking at me in the wreckage of my training gym, with a retinue of other officers, figuring it’d take him about a month to get enough support for an effective coup. Darth Tantrum wasn’t a fit leader for the First Order. So I decided I was going to outlive him, if for no other reason than to piss him off, and that the only way to do that was to be a good enough Supreme Leader that he wouldn’t be able to raise an immediate coup. So, I took the shit he had, and handled it. Competently. Much to his, and my, astonishment. I’d never had to do any… administrative stuff, or… lead anything bigger than a flight squadron before. I was even more surprised to see that I sort of liked doing it. And two days later, as I was thinking about how to deal with the next problem, Rey showed up in one of my visions, or I showed up in one of hers, and things started to change.”

Jon nods, glances at the chronometer. “Speaking of changing. We’ve got an hour.” He nods to one of the doors off his sitting room. “Bedroom and refresher are in there. Don’t use all the hot water.”

Kylo gets up. “I’ll try not to.”

* * *

 

 

 

 

In the refresher, out of his clothing, Kylo takes a moment to just _look_ at himself.

He smirks a bit; it’s _really_ not 25 centimeters. Especially not right now, when it’s just dangling about, waiting for him to get in the refresher. Outside of some of the pictures he and Rey have looked at, and he’s suspicious as to if they’re _accurate,_ he’s fairly sure human men don’t come equipped with twenty-five centimeters of shaft. It’s just… not a thing.

The rest of him, though…

Rey likes to look at him… Jon appears to like looking, too. And he’s noticed the occasional other person who’s enjoyed the view, too, but…

Jon’s right, the ability to internalize that on any level got beaten, literally and figuratively, out of him.

So he looks, and tries to actually _see._ See himself, his physical body, here, now. Not M’Gll’s disgust because he couldn’t keep his desires to himself. Not Luke’s disappointment because he wasn’t ever going to be a proper Jedi. Not his mother’s fear, or his father’s worry. Not Snoke’s hate. Not Hux’s revulsion. Not Phasma’s cool one-upsmanship.

Not the black clad monster he wrapped himself in to protect the shreds of a soft heart hiding underneath.

His body, here, now, black hair to long, angular feet.

The scars are real, and likely eternal, he’ll have them as long as he breathes, but… They’re starting to fade, some. They’re what his eyes find first. He notices, as he looks from the tip of his eyebrow, down across his chest, to his shoulder, his arm, and his side, to his arms and legs and the myriad small marks he collected over the years. The cuts he had the time and inclination to get enough bacta on to heal close to clean. They’re all fading or faded. The raised ridges of flesh have either smoothed out, or are starting to. He brushes his hand across his face, and now, by feel alone, he can’t tell where the scar is, because it’s no longer a chasm cut into his flesh. Just a shiny pink line.

It’s been more than a year since he’s bled.

He took a lot of bruises in the fight at Qualeen Prime, but he didn’t get cut.

More than a year since he’s broken a bone.

More than a year to _heal._

He knows that’s the longest stretch of his adult life without an injury. He suspects it’s the longest stretch of his life, period. Even child Ben got hurt, a lot.

The body under the scars gets his attention next. He’s not as lean as he was as the Master of the Knights of Ren. Real food and sleep has taken care of that. He might be broader across the shoulders and chest and thighs, he knows he’s broader across the waist and hips. Some of it’s muscle, some is fat, but apparently letting his body have the nourishment and rest it needs has made him bigger than he used to be.

He doesn’t mind.

He’s pale. Unless Rey’s vision of him out and building with the Maji becomes a regular thing, he’s always going to be pale. That’s just genetics and lack of natural sunlight.

But he doesn’t have a pallor anymore. He doesn’t look sick. The purple circles around his eyes have faded. His too red lips and too red scars and too bright eyes that always gave him a feverish look with his too pale skin have faded.

The gauntness has faded.

The pain and the loss and the anger and… And the marks they all left on him, are faded.

And in front of him, there’s a body, shattered glass edges worn down, gnarled scars rubbed smoother, bones too close to the surface covered over by forgiving flesh.

And looking, he can see that he’s a thing, a physical, visual thing, that probably isn’t handsome. His idea of handsome is more of Hux, or Jon, or Lando, men who are smooth and polished and evenly proportioned, and not of a too big, too sharp, too… everything, him. But, it could be attractive.

That his physical self could induce, and possibly encourage, desire, and not just for power or gain or…

Thumping against the door. “You know how to use the refresher controls, right?”

Kylo supposes that, given the things he doesn’t know how to do, and the huge bath in his room, that’s a legitimate question.

“Yes.”

“Then move it. We’re on the chrono, Kylo. Hurry up.”

He nods. Time to get moving.

 

 

* * *

Jon has noticed that his mother’s touch and attention brings out the best in the women she sees to. He’s unaware of the fact that he, too, can have that effect.

But in an hour or so, Rey will certainly see the difference, and appreciate it.

 

 

* * *

Getting out of the refresher, Kylo’s not entirely certain what to do. The formal wear he’s expected to wear to this thing is not, in fact, located with him, in the refresher. Meaning he’s not going to get changed in here.

He knows what he’d do normally. If he were with his knights. Or back in the communal showers of Luke’s school. Or with any other soldier under his command he trusted enough to be in this sort of situation with. He’d just towel off, head into the bedroom, where the fresh clothing likely is, and start getting dressed.

Because him being naked has never been an issue before.

Putting the clothing he just took off back on to go two meters, wait for Jon to get into the refresher, and then take it back off again, to change into his dress clothing seems ridiculously stupid to him.

And… Okay… Jon likes men. Jon likes women. Jon has, presumably, been in changing rooms before without getting weird about it, so…

He dries off, wraps the towel around his hair so he doesn’t drip all over the place, and heads out to get dressed.

 

 

* * *

Jon’s reading. He’s sitting on his bed, datapad in hand, drink nearby, eyes scanning over something.

He glances at Kylo, blinks, smirks a bit, and says, “You’re right. That’s not twenty-five centimeters.” He gestures to the suit bag over the end of the bed, and says, “Suit’s in there. New one. I’ve got you matched to Rey for tonight.” And then gets up to use the refresher.

 

 

 

A moment later, Kylo hears the water turn on, and from there, getting dressed is fairly simple.

 

* * *

He’s dressed and brushing out his hair when Jon comes back. His towel is around his waist, which… is probably where people who are used to people wear things like towels when they’re going to be casually somewhat naked around other people.

Or something.

He winces a little, puts that away for things to remember for next time, and that gets him thinking. “Not that I mind the company, but tell me I get to do this with Rey next time.”

Jon sniggers at that. “Missing her already?”

“I don’t have to try and figure out how to behave when I’m with her. I _know._ ” He starts to pull his hair back.

“You’re doing fine,” Jon says as he heads into the rest of his rooms, fiddles around with something, and then comes back with two more drinks, handing one of them to Kylo.

Kylo takes a sip before saying, “That doesn’t sound like, ‘Of course you can get dressed with her next time.’”

Jon’s smirking at that. “You miss out on the surprise if you’re getting ready with her. And, at least in my experience, people like having their mate see them and then go mute and stupid because they look so good it freezes their brains solid.”

Kylo sighs. “She’s appreciated that in the past.”

“So, she’s likely to appreciate it in the future, too.” Jon heads to his drawers to pull out his underthings and socks. “Okay. I’ve been wondering about this for a while. The wedding I’m not supposed to be planning…”

Kylo turns from the mirror where he’s pulling his hair back. “Yeah.”

“Isn’t she _already_ your wife?” Jon asks, slipping into his socks.

“Yes.”

“Uh…” Jon’s just staring at him. “Do… Jedi do it differently than everyone else?”

“Jedi don’t get married at all.” Kylo turns back to the mirror, stares at his hair, pulled back, tight and severe, and takes it out of the ponytail, running his fingers through it, letting it fall free. “Most of them are celibate for vast stretches of their lives. And Maji don’t have any traditions, yet. So… maybe we get married first, and have weddings later. Does… no one else do it that way?”

Jon wiggles his hand as he’s pulling up his shorts. “Occasionally. Usually, if the lady’s up the duff—“ He can tell by the blank expression on Kylo’s face that he’s got _no_ idea what that means. “Pregnant.” Kylo nods. “They might sneak a fast contract signing in, and hold off on the party until later. But, usually weddings celebrate the start of the relationship, not the… middle.”

“That’s how the Kinears did it. But… You and Lane didn’t have a wedding a week after you met, right?”

“Two years later.”

Now it’s Kylo’s turn to stare at Jon.

“It’s different.”

“How?”

Jon’s not sure how to explain that. He spends a moment thinking about it, and finally says, “There was a time you and Rey weren’t married, right?”

Kylo takes the time to think about that, _really_ think about that. “I’m not sure. There was a time she wasn’t in my life, not as a person, but… There’s always been this… presence, hope… feel… And I knew it was her within a few hours of ‘meeting’ her for the first time. We’ve… as long as I’ve known her… been connected. So… if married is about you and yours until the end of your days… I’ve felt that, since I saw her. Granted, in the beginning, I was fairly sure she was the one who was going to kill me, so ‘end of our days’ had a somewhat different context, but…”

Jon sighs and nods. “Okay, it doesn’t work that way for normal people. Granted, normal people don’t have visions of one another. And normal people can’t tell what each other are thinking. And for normal people there’s often this romantic love thing that goes along with spending the rest of your days together…”

“And they can’t teleport to each other, and cosmic destiny isn’t a factor… Yeah… Extenuating circumstances. As of right now, unless Poe comes home with a spouse tomorrow and wants a wedding the day after, we’ll be the first Maji to have a wedding, so I guess we’ll set the traditions. Or we’ll do it the way we like it, and everyone else will just… do whatever they do.”

Jon’s staring at Kylo, really looking at him, and for a moment Kylo’s starting to feel a little uncomfortable. He takes another sip of his drink, and finally says, “It’ll work better if you just ask.”

Jon nods… “Probably. Not sure if I want to.”

“Well, if you keep staring at me like that, I’m going to know your question whether you want me to or not, so ask or get your mind off of it.”

“Okay… Uh… Keep in mind, I’m not trying to be insulting.”

“I can feel that. You’re curious.”

“Yeah.” Jon looks nervous. “Do you… actually love Rey? Or is this… all… destiny and Force stuff?”

“Yes?” Kylo says, with a bit of question in his voice. He’s not entirely sure how to explain this to Jon. Then an idea hits. “Think about Lane for a moment. Happy things.”

“Okay,” and Jon does.

Kylo smiles a little, letting himself ghost along on Jon’s feelings. Pleasure, and comfort, and sex, and home, and joy, and sorrow, and ache… “Okay. Thank you. Yes, I feel that way about Rey. And there’s also this destiny thing. And there’s the Force meddling. But the core of it is that feeling of… just… right.”

Jon nods at that. “Okay.” And then he starts getting dressed in earnest.

Kylo glances at the stuff Jon’s putting on, eyes slightly narrowed. It looks familiar, but it’s not his usual uniform, and it’s not the sort of suit Kylo just put on, so… “We have dress uniforms?”

“ _I_ have a dress uniform.” Jon says pulling the jacket closed. “Kinear and Schiff do, too. I haven’t put them into a full production line, yet. Assuming they haven’t burned them or something, the rest of your officer class still has First Order dress uniforms with their First Order badge ripped off and the Order badge attached.”

Kylo nods.

“Yeah. Getting them rolled out for everyone else is on the list.”

“Thank you.” Kylo looks Jon up and down. He’s in a slim and trim blue-green suit. The trousers are straight legged, and there’s a jacket, top of the thigh length, asymmetrically cut from his middle waist to his right shoulder. It’s a soft fabric, with black detailing on the cuffs and collar, and three white stripes, two of them with a silver Order hexagon in the middle, on his left sleeve. The Order symbol is on his right shoulder, in silver, a clasp for the jacket. On the left there's a gleaming black name badge. A gray belt with a black buckle wraps around his waist. The trousers are close to the leg, with a black stripe down the side, in the same thread as the detailing on the cuffs and collar. “I like the pants. The… bulgy things on the other ones, I never liked them.”

“Jodhpurs. The bulgy things are jodhpurs. They date back, way, way, way back to before fabrics that stretched and when officers actually used to ride animals into combat, and the extra fabric allowed for better range of motion in the legs.”

“Okay. I always thought they looked frighteningly stupid.”

“Then it’s a good thing that I’m not the one who decided they were a good addition to the First Order Uniform.”

Kylo winces. “Right. Sorry. Uh…”

“Most of the uniforms pre-date me. And I designed armor, not the uniforms, not until after I took over Tactical Design. But… Just as a way to work on saying the right things, try to keep in mind what the people around you _do_ so you don’t unintentionally shit on their work.”

“Noted.”

“And until you’re good at that, having non-committal or positive opinions on things is likely a good plan.” Jon checks his hair. In that all he’s done is towel dry it, it’s not even remotely ready, yet. “Scoot,” he says to Kylo, who is in front of the mirror. Kylo scoots, as Jon gets his brush and goes to it.

Kylo looks at his current outfit. It’s… different. “I like this.”

Jon nods, rubbing something through his hair.

“The cuffs… They’re not actually green, right?”

“The fabric is black, but the fibers reflect light with a green tinge. You mentioned wanting some colors occasionally, and I’ve got some on Rey, so…”

Kylo smiles at that. “I like it a lot. This is pretty much exactly the color I was trying to get on Gidi Secundus, but they wouldn’t make a suit for me like that.”

Jon looks surprised by that. “If you told me they wouldn’t make you a suit in orange or yellow, I’d understand. You’d look awful in those shades, but… Blackened green? That color’s pretty much made for you.”

Kylo sighs. “Apparently, the only men in their culture who wear black or anything approaching it are pleasure specialists looking for clients, and the tailor suggested that wouldn’t be a great outfit for a nice night with my wife.”

Jon laughs hard enough at that, he’s curling in on himself and his shoulders are vibrating. Finally he says, “I’d literally have paid money to see how that worked out. Do you think you would have figured out what was going on before someone pinched your ass, or after?”

Kylo rolls his eyes. “After. He didn’t want to explain that to me, so the conversation about colors was fun.” Kylo’s eyeing his toiletry bag. Those little bottles Jon gave him all those months ago are in there. He’s explored them enough to have opened both and sniffed at them and… They’re fine. One is sort of dry and woody, and the other one is kind of wet and ocean-y.  But he’s still never worn cologne before and isn’t exactly sure how one goes about doing it.

(He assumes it’s got to be more complicated than just pour the stuff over himself. Because it seems like everything in the world is more complicated than he thinks it should be.)

Finally he grabs the nearest of the bottles and says, “What do you do with this?”

There’s a second where Jon looks like he almost can’t believe Kylo doesn’t know how to do this, then another second where he’s _not_ shaking his head about the holes in Kylo’s education, but he shifts that aside, and says, “Take the top off, put your wrist over the top, flip it over so the liquid touches your skin, flip it back so the liquid is no longer touching your skin, remove the bottle, put the top back on, and then rub your wrists together and on your neck.”

“So… just a drop or two?”

“Yeah. Less probably. If it’s not enough you can always add more, but too much isn’t going to be doing anyone any favors.”

“Okay.” He takes his jacket off and pulls up his sleeve, and takes care of it. After a minute he says, “It smells different.”

“Yeah. They react to your body chemistry. No scent will smell the same on two different people. Similar, but not the same.”

It’s still woody, but dry is fading, and there’s some sort of warm spicy scent coming through. Kylo decides it’s pleasant enough, and doesn’t go heading for the refresher to wash it off.

Jon puts his brush down, glances at the chronometer, and says, “Finish your drink, and then come on, time to go.”

Kylo looks pleased, swallows the last few gulps, and says, “Finally. I hate waiting around.”

Jon smirks. “Wait until we get to that wedding I’m not supposed to be planning. We’ll stuff you in a room somewhere for what will feel like months while the girls get ready and the guests show up and all the rest of it comes together.”

Kylo smiles. “Yet. Not planning, _yet._ ”

And that gets a genuine grin out of Jon.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm almost sure I don't have to say this, but... on the off chance there's an impressionable young person out there reading this: Yes, alcohol is a traditional remedy for social anxiety. That said, there are newer, better, more functional, with fewer unfortunate side effects remedies for social anxiety out there, and you live in a galaxy where they are a thing. So, unlike Jon and Kylo, who, apparently, do not live in a galaxy with things like mental health professionals (Which likely explains a hell of a lot about how the Star Wars world works.) don't self-medicate, go out, find a professional, and talk to one about it. 
> 
> Meanwhile, for those of you who want to know why Kylo isn't trashed: he's averaging 3/4s of a shot an hour and weighs 92 kilos. 
> 
> Also, "floof" is about the equivalent of calling someone a pansy. It's rude, indicates a certain level of femininity/fragility/prettiness that's considered "inappropriate" in a male, but not a slur.


	62. Getting Ready: Rey

12/31/1

 

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Finn asks Rose for the fifth time, this hour, as she’s getting ready to go join Rey on the _Supremacy_ to ‘get ready’ for this party-thing.

“Finn…”

“Yeah, I know, back off, but… Really?”

“Is she our friend?”

“Yeah.”

“Do we love her?”

“Yeah.”

“Is she nervous about being stuck, alone, in a room full of wolves—“

He turns to face her. “See, that’s the problem, right there! She shouldn’t be stuck, alone, or with you, in a room full of wolves. She should be here, with us, in an entirely wolf-free environment, where she doesn’t have to do things like get dressed up and mingle with snots just to make some stuck-up twit feel like a king in front of those snots.”

There is a part of Rose who agrees with that. And another part that joined the Resistance to avenge her family, that’s _cheering_ that. And another part, a deeper part, that actually believes in things like making the galaxy a better place, that’s _uncomfortable_ with the first two parts. And there’s the fact that this is her friend, and she is nervous, and this _making things better_ stuff matters to her, and she should… support that, right? She condenses all of that into: “That’s the least charitable read on the situation possible.”

“And I’m entirely comfortable with that. She shouldn’t have to be someone else to make this man happy.”

Rose sighs. “She doesn’t _have_ to, she’s choosing to.”

“The choice shouldn’t even be on the list. It’s nothing she’d do for herself.”

“Yeah, well, leaving Jakku wasn’t anything she’d have done for herself, either.” She eyes Finn. He shoots her a mild glare. “Sometimes change is good. Sometimes it’s scary, but still good.”

“You think _this_ is good?” It’s clear that Finn doesn’t. It’s also clear that there’s literally _nothing_ the Order in general or Ren in specific can do to win Finn’s approval, so…

Rose sighs a bit. “I’m waiting until I actually see it, but, it might be. And if it gets us closer to a galaxy at peace for Paige and any little brothers or sisters she may have to grow up in…”

“That’s a low blow.” Just because Finn doesn’t approve, and on any level of foreseeable future won’t approve, doesn’t mean he doesn’t see how things are changing, and recognize that raising his kids in a galaxy a peace is vastly superior to raising them in one at war.

“It’s still true. Since we found out it’s him… I’ve been talking to the Order kids, really talking to them—“

“Jacen?” Finn raises an eyebrow at that. Jacen’s all about talking up Ren. Jacen thinks the sun rises and sets on Ren’s ass, and for the time being Finn’s avoiding the hell out of him, because he’s fairly certain that after a conversation with Jacen, he too will decide the sun rises and sets on Ren’s ass, for about half an hour, until his brain comes back to his head.

 

 

Rose gives him _the look._ “No. I know if I talk to him I’ll come away thinking Ren’s the most splendid thing to ever splendid. The other kids.”

“Okay.”

“He’s making things better.”

Finn growls under this breath.

“I know. We had a saying at home, even the Devil sings a pretty tune, but, at least for them, the pretty tune is making things _better._ ”

Finn glares again, and then says, grudgingly, “That’s the only reason why I haven’t asked you not to go.”

“And I appreciate you not asking.” They hear their door chime, and Finn goes to open it. Rey’s on the other side.

“Ready?” she says to Rose.

Rose hits her with a quick smile. Then she kisses Paige, who is snoozing in the crib on the far side of the room, and her husband, and says to him quietly, “Besides, it’s been a million years since I got a chance to get all prettied up and let you properly appreciate it.”

He kisses her again. “I always appreciate you.”

She’s smiling up at him. “Yeah, well, tonight, I expect a _lot_ of appreciating.”

He does smile at that, as Rey takes Rose’s hand, and they both blink out of his home.

 

 

* * *

As soon as they’re through to Kylo’s rooms, Rose looks around, blinks a few times, looks around again, and then says, “I thought you were kidding.”

“About?” Rey asks, as Kylo’s standing next to her, arm around her, trying to look relaxed and comfortable with Rose in his home. (And he’s _almost,_ if you don’t look closely, succeeding. Rey can feel he’s a bit nervous, wanting Rose to feel comfortable here.)

“It’s _all_ black.” She stops looking around and focuses on Kylo, who’s in his casual blacks right now. “Why?” The door to the refresher is open, so she darts in, checks, and comes back, “Even your wiping paper is black. How…”

 

 

Kylo doesn’t exactly shrug at that. “It was this way when I got here. It’s possible Hux thought it was a joke.”  

At the mention of Hux, Rose’s eyes narrow. “He set this up.”

“Before I killed Snoke, I was stationed on the _Finalizer._ Between this being our capitol ship, and the damage to it, I needed to be here. I told him I needed a throne room, an office, and a bedroom, and that I wanted only one exit/entrance point, a week later I had new rooms. These are them. He may have handled it. He may have handed it off. I suppose it’s possible they were this color already. My previous rooms had a lot of black in them, too, but there was also some white and gray.”

“What happened to him?” Rose asks. “Our spies knew he died, but no intel got out on how.”

“I ran him through with my lightsaber while choking the life out of him.”

Rose blinks, rubs her lips together, and then nods. “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.” Then she says, “Why?”

Kylo tilts his head a little. This is the first real conversation he’s had with Rose, and he’s trying to make it good. “The proximate reason was he was trying to rise a coup, and was getting to the point where he was close enough to succeeding that I needed him gone. The secondary reason was blowing things and people up got him hard, and I knew that if I left him in command much longer he’d start doing it for kicks. And the third reason was he just annoyed me as a person, and at that point in time, I didn’t exactly see a problem with killing people for annoying me.”

Rose can remember Hux lording over her, being… “He was a fucking cunt.”

Kylo blinks at that, and Rey does, too, both of them shocked by the language.

Then Kylo says, “Yeah, that about wraps it up. He, and as many people who thought like him that I could find, have been gone for a while now, though.”

None of them know what exactly to say after that. 

 

 

* * *

Jon shows up with his mom and sister after a few minutes, hustling Kylo out of there. (It amuses Rose to see that Ren doesn’t exactly want to go.) And then it’s just her and Rey, and Mirina and Tasha, who are exactly the sort of people who set Rose’s teeth on edge at Canto Bight.

Everything about them just _screams_ rich.

It’s not even that their working clothing is all that expensive or glamorous. It’s the posture and manners and perfume and carefully done hair and…

Rose takes a breath. She and Rey are getting changed into their robes, so that once they’re all ‘made up’ they can get dressed easily. She makes herself close her eyes and be calm. These women are not war profiteers. They aren’t weapons designers.

She can’t stop the little sarcastic voice in the back of her head that says, “No, they’re the people who got rich making pretty dresses for them.”

She closes her eyes, swallows, and tries to be calm and supportive of this. Rey squeezes her hand, and nods. She mouths a quick, _Thank you._ By then they’re both in their robes, though Rose is looking at Rey’s. It’s _big._

“Is that Kylo’s?”

“Yeah.”

It’s old, battered, too big for Rey, and blue. She looks like she’s about to be swallowed by a huge terry cloth hug.

Rose smirks at that. “So, he does own a few things that aren’t black.”

“A few.” She glances to the bathroom door. “You ready?”

“Yeah.”

 

 

* * *

It helps that Mirina appears to be genuinely disappointed that Paige didn’t come along for this. “I miss babies. My girls are all out of the baby business, and it doesn’t look like Jon’s going to have any.” She says while she starts opening the bags of “tricks of the trade” that she had Jon lug into Kylo’s room.

“You don’t know that, Mom,” Tasha says.

“I know enough.”

“He likes girls, too.” Tasha shrugs a shoulder, turning to Rey and Rose to explain. “Jon’s a bit of a floof, but he plays both sides of the street.”

“That’s not what I meant!” Mirina says, looking annoyed, but Rose isn’t sure if she’s annoyed by Tasha outing her brother, or by her misunderstanding her thoughts on Jon’s likelihood of producing more grandbabies for her. She also doesn’t know how much Rose and Rey know about Jon, so she starts with, “Jon’s a widower. He loved his husband… just… beyond measure. That’s a hole you don’t refill quickly. By the time he might be thinking about getting married again, he’ll be in his mid-thirties, with a career that demands all of his time, adding a baby on top of that is a mess. I know, I’ve been there and done that, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

“Oh,” There’s a level of unspoken context between Tasha and Mirina, but Rose doesn’t get it, and Rey doesn’t poke.

“Still, there’s nothing like a baby. The way they smell and snuggle. Those amazing baby hugs where they just melt onto you,” Mirina looks wistful at that.

Rose softens a bit toward her. “Paige is deliciously cuddly.”

“She really is,” Rey adds.

“Though right now, cuddling her is a rather drooly experience. She’s cutting teeth, and…”

And Rose, Mirina, and Tasha, moms all, have more than a few things to say about the glorious joy that is teething infants, and how, yes, if said teething infant could be fobbed off on her father for an afternoon, that could go a long way towards a pleasant outing. 

 

 

* * *

Rey wasn’t entirely sure what exactly ‘getting ready’ would entail. Getting her hair done, makeup, dressed, okay, sure. That she got.

Listening to Mirina, Tasha, and Rose swap veteran mommy stories about all of the unfortunate places they’ve found baby-poop wasn’t on the list. Listening to that, while Mirina unloads a collection of little hovering, bright orangey-copper spheres, with finger-like appendages folding out of their sides… “Are these med-droids?” Rey asks.

“Originally.” Tasha says. “It took a little re-programming on Helene, my next youngest sister’s, part, but they’re amazingly versatile. We use them for hair and makeup.”

“We used to have a team of people, but bringing a host of people around for everything just made it more complicated. R33 and R38 over here,” The droids don’t appear to speak, but they might be able to hear. They hover over to Mirina, who pets them, “fit in a bag, are never late, won’t party too hard the night before the celebration, and won’t ever ‘misunderstand’ your directions.”

Tasha pulls out her computer, messes around on it for a moment, and then hands it to Rey, saying, “We’ve got you programmed in, and a collection of hair and makeup styles. You pick what you like, have a seat, and R33 gets to it.”

Mirina says to Rose, “And while she’s doing that,” and another… this one doesn’t appear to be a droid, this one is a machine, a long, rectangular box, with two round holes in the side she’s setting toward Rose, is pulled out of Mirina’s bag of tricks. “We’ll get your nails.”

“I don’t…” Rose is shaking her head. “It’ll be a mess in less than a day.” She holds up her hands. “I work with my hands every day.”

“It doesn’t have to do lacquer,” Tasha says. “You could just have them trimmed and shined. Give it a try, if for nothing else than the hand and foot rub. Trust me, it feels great.”

Rey nods at that. “It did when I got mine done before.”

Rose squints a little, not sure about this, also not sure about developing what are likely expensive tastes. Rey smiles at that. “Think of it this way, if we’re going to do Canto Bight, we’ve got to look the part, and the ladies there have nice nails. And, I now have a bottle of the stuff that takes lacquer off, so if you want it, I’ve got the stuff to remove it with.”

Rose rolls her eyes a little, speaking of things you do for your spouse. “That’s more Finn’s game than mine.”

“Is your husband a gambler?” Mirina asks.

“Not generally. We were… there on business once… And he’d really like to go back. And Poe, and those two, seem to be keen on it, so…”

“A night out with your husband, playing the tables, should be an excellent time, and…” Tasha is snapping pictures of Rose, getting a feel for how she looks, and putting her into the computer. “Every couple deserves at least a day, or better yet a _night_ or two, without their baby, and with each other.”

Rose smirks at that. Between the fact that they intend to cheat like crazy, _and_ the date night aspect of this, she doesn’t exactly have to be dragged along for this plan, but… It’s not exactly anything she’d chose to do for herself.

“When do you intend to go?” Mirina asks, grabbing her sketch pad, looking at Rose.

“Uh…” Rose glances to Rey, and Rey shrugs. “I understand we’re still building up seed money for the trip. So…”

“Six months?” Rey says.

“Something like that. Maybe a year. Poe says it’ll be expensive.”

“Poe isn’t wrong. Canto Bight is for people with credits to burn. It’s actually a bit tacky for my tastes. I prefer Elysiam II, but everyone says I’m a snob, so…” Tasha replies, finishing up with the manicure box. “Just put your hand in here, arms up to your elbows. I know it looks and feels weird right now, but trust me, you’ll like it.”

Rose does, feeling a bit nervous, but… All she feels is just a soft, smooth, warm plexi-plastic that suddenly whirls to life and starts gently rubbing her hands and forearms. She jerks, a little, and then relaxes. It actually is rather pleasant, and… “Oh… I… didn’t know my hands were that tense.”

“Most of us don’t. Mom and I work with our hands all day, too. A lot of the time, we just use it for massage and moisturizing, keep the fingers nimble and the skin happy. Back at our shop, we’ve got a larger one that fits over your shoulders and gets everything from your scalp to your hips.”

“After ten hours on the sewing machine, Old Berthat’s a lifesaver,” Mirina adds.

Rey can imagine. What she can’t imagine is Elysiam II because she knows nothing about it. “What’s Elysiam II?” 

“That’s where people who like to play expensive games, but don’t feel a need to engage in ostentatious displays of wealth go. It’s still super lux, but less…” Tasha thinks of a way to explain it. “Okay… At Canto Bight they have drinks with gold flakes floating in them. Why? You can’t taste it. It doesn’t make the drink any better. It’s just a way to show off how much money you’ve got. You can afford to literally shit gold. You can’t get that at Elysiam II. You can still get the cocktail, likely a better one, but the ingredients will be in there because they actually improve the drink, not just to show off how much you can spend. I prefer the clientele there. People who use their money for things they can actually _enjoy._ ”

“It’s invite only, but I’m sure the Master can get an invitation,” Mirina adds. (Rey mentally winces. Their plan really won’t work if _The Master_ is going.) Then she leans over and taps Rey’s computer, stopping it on a hairstyle. “That one would be simply lovely on you, dear. You’ve got such a pretty neck, you really should show it off.”

Rose nods toward the computer and Rey shifts it so Rose can see it. It’s an elegant updo, sweeping the hair up into a complicated knot at the back of Rey’s head. Rose is nodding. “It’d look nice.”

“Okay.” Rey looks to Mirina. “I just…”

“Click on the button, sit back, peruse makeup options, and let R33 do the rest.”

“Okay,” so she sits on their bed, hits the button, and the droid zips over, and starts to play with her hair. 

 

 

* * *

Mirina’s eyeing Rose, thinking, and then begins to sketch on her pad.

They’re mostly quiet. The machine whirring away. Mirina sketching. Tasha looking around at Kylo’s rooms. She’s been in here several times now, but the _all_ black still gets to her. She can’t imagine voluntarily living _here._

But Jon likes him, really likes him. That much is clear just by the way he talks about _The Master._ So, there’s got to be a _person_ under all that black…

So… “So, how did you meet him?” Tasha asks.

Rose looks over to Rey, also very interested in this, because, well, she doesn’t exactly know. She’s got an idea, because Finn’s told the story of going to Starkiller to get Rey back and the fight and whatnot, but… “You know, I’ve never heard your version of this story, either.” Rose adds.

“My version?” Rey asks. “Whose have you heard?” She knows that Rose and Kylo haven’t talked about this.

“Finn’s. He was there, right?”

Rey wiggles her hand to indicate sort-of. “He was… nearby, for some of it. And it’s a pretty long story.”

“Well, get talking then,” Mirina says, pouring a cup of tea, stretching a bit, and going back to the sketch pad. “We’ve only got three hours.”

“It’s not that long of a story, is it?” Rose asks.

“It’s not that long. It’s just… Uh…” She can feel the way Mirina’s looking at her, without actually looking up from the dress she’s sketching, telling her this will be a really common question, and if she doesn’t want to get stuck in it, she needs some version of this story to tell. It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to sound true.

Rey’s not sure what to do with that. She decides to go for true. Enough. “He was looking for Luke Skywalker. I had seen the bit of the map he needed. He was chasing me, and I was running away—“

“Thus begins a million good romances,” Mirina adds, actually looking up.

“They do seem to like it when you run away and make them chase you,” Tasha adds.

Rose and Rey look at each other, not entirely sure what to do with that, or if the ladies understand that Rey means this literally, or for that matter, if the ladies are being serious or not. “Eventually he caught me, and interrogated me, which… didn’t exactly work out the way either of us expected.”

“How so?” Rose is the one asking. She’s heard about Poe’s interrogation story, and can’t imagine anyone thinking that was fun, let alone a good way to start a relationship off, so…

“Uh… he… was… just sort of kneeling there in front of me… And I’d been unconscious, but dreaming, weird dreams, the sense of danger and safety, and… a boy… I’d seen him in my dreams before… And I jerk awake and there’s just… him… The monster in the mask.

“And… I was… secured, so I couldn’t run away or fight, but… he’s just sitting there, tells me I’m his guest. I asked where Finn was, and… he set me off balance by calling Finn a traitor and thief and… Like he was personally insulted that Finn ran away. I’d never thought of it that way. Poe might have been the thief. I think he stole a ship to get away. Or maybe he was talking about Han… Kylo told me he didn’t know where they were.

“I was thinking about killing him, and he got kind of snippy about it.”

“Snippy? He’s kidnapped you, strapped you down, you’re glaring at him, thinking about killing him, and he’s getting _snippy_?” Rose asks. She would have assumed the RageMonster would come out if Rey didn’t immediately do whatever Kylo wanted.

“Well… ‘You still want to kill me?’ Like he couldn’t believe it.”

“Again, he’s hunted you down, stolen you, and has you tied up in an interrogation room, and he was genuinely surprised by this?” Rose is coming to the conclusion that Kylo Ren may not be as violent as she’d heard, but is, apparently, dumber than a box of rocks.

“I told him that tended to happen when you’re being hunted by a creature in a mask. Then everything goes quiet for a moment, and he reaches for the mask and takes it off.” Rey bites her lip, and doesn’t miss the way Tasha and Mirina smirk at each other. “He didn’t have the scar yet, not across his face, and… His hair was really soft and fluffy, a lot shorter than it is now, and… I’m kind of just staring at him in amazement. Because, well… he’s… uh…” She bites her lip, never having said this before, and admitting it feels really odd, but… She married the guy, so it’s probably okay to admit this, “Really attractive. And I just stare at him for a moment, and then blink out of that, because again, monster, hunted me down, had me strapped to an interrogation table…”

Tasha and Mirina look at each other and that smirk just glows brighter _._ The chase, power, danger, knowing that your life is being held in someone else’s hands, all of these things are deeply erotic, to the right person. Watching that look, Rey understands that the ladies understood she meant chase literally, and so did they.

Rose is just sort of staring at Rey in amazement. She doesn’t care how good looking a man is, he grabs her without her consent and she is _not_ going to find him attractive.

“Was he giving you puppy eyes?” Tasha asks. “He looks like he’d be good at puppy eyes.”

Rey just stares at her. “I don’t know what a puppy is.”

Tasha’s about to explain, and then says, “Never mind. I’ll ask Jon.”

Now Rose is looking at Rey, because she does know what a puppy is, and thinking for a few moments to the bits and pieces she’s seen of Kylo, and Kylo with Rey, or Kylo with Paige, and… “He totally does. I don’t know if he was doing it then, but he totally does now.”

“When?”

Rose shakes her head. “I haven’t seen it, yet, but with how he is with you, and Paige, he’s got to do it.” Then she flashes Rey her version of puppy eyes.

Rey just stares at her, incredulity oozing off of her. “He _never_ looks at me like that.”

“I’ll kick you the next time it happens.”

“Okay. We’re staring at each other, and he starts rummaging around in my mind, because he can, looking for the map, seeing the oceans and the island.” But of course, they don’t know what the oceans or island were, either. “The joke was on him, because that’s where the map was leading me, but neither of us knew it then.”

“Did it hurt?” Rose asks.

Rey’s eyebrows furl. “No! Why…”

“It hurt when he did it to Poe.”

“It was mentally uncomfortable, because it’s like… Watching a flipbook of your life, with someone else shuffling through the images, but… No, it didn’t hurt. It was… hard, because there were pages of the book I _didn’t_ want him to see. And he’s shuffling through, able to feel how hard I’m clamping down on some images, trying to keep him out… And, there was this moment, a sensation of something… immense… coming at us, and he said to me, ‘Don’t be afraid, I feel it, too,’ and a moment later he was in my head, and I was in his, and I was feeling his past, his fears, his insecurities, plowing through his flipbook, and he jerked back, and broke the connection, stalked out of there.

“We’ve been… connected, ever since.”

“That’s the Force Bond the kids talk about?” Rose asks.

Rey nods. “Yeah. I’d felt it for a long time, knew there was something different about me, but that’s when my Force really woke up, in response to his. I… shouldn’t be this good at this stuff this fast, but… He did the fifteen years of training, and I can… and have… and did… pull from that.” 

“So, he’s… in your head… all the time?” Tasha asks.

“Uh… No. Not… like that.” Rose is also staring at Rey, and it’s clear on her face that she thinks this is somewhere between creepy and amazing. “It takes focus. I can reach out and talk to him, or get a sense of what’s going on with him if I want to, and he can do the same with me, but it’s not always on. He isn’t eavesdropping on this conversation.”

“But, when you focus, you can feel what he’s up to?” Mirina asks.

Rey nods.

“And he can do it for you, too?” Rose asks.

Rey nods. The other three women share a look, and then Rose and Tasha share another look, and start to smirk.

“What?” Rey asks.

Rose is giggling. “So, you’ve never had to have that… ‘Just… a little to the left… No, my left… Yeah, right there… Harder. Yikes! No, not that hard! Yeah, okay, just, like… that… Don’t stop! What do you mean your hand is tired? You just started doing it right?’ conversation?”

Tasha and Mirina are full out laughing at this, and Rey’s doing her best not to laugh while also dealing with the fact that she didn’t know that was a thing people do. Finally, she says, “Uh… no. Especially when we’re close, we can generally feel each other, so… No.”

“So, he can feel… what you feel?” Rose asks. “Poe should be here for this; he’d love to know.”

“Poe does not need to be here for this,” Rey’s blushing at the kilometer long list of jokes Poe’d come up with if he knew that, “And, yes, uh… I can feel it through him or he can feel it through me, and sometimes… it’s we… and that can be a bit confusing to slide into or pull out of, but…”

“We?” Rose asks.

“The bodies get kind of… superfluous.”

“He can feel what you’re thinking…” Tasha says.

“Right.”

“Oh…” she winces a bit.

“Why would that be a bad thing?” Rey asks.

“What about when you’re not thinking about him? Can he just watch your fantasies like a holovid?” Rey just stares at Tasha. Tasha’s staring back, dumbfounded, until she says, “You’re _always_ thinking about him when you…”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Tasha looks dumbfounded. “There’s literally two and a half million men on this ship alone, and…”

Rey blinks. “Oh… I mean. Yes, there are, but…” She blushes a little. “It’s not that I’m never thinking about other people, but… When we’re looking at pictures or whatever, we do that together, and by the time we’re touching and whatnot, I’m focused on him or me, or him and me, and… It’s good.”

“You look at pictures, together?” This being something Rose has never thought of.

Rey nods. “Sometimes. Uh… Our library. If you put, erotic human nudes into the search bar, something like two hundred books show up, and there’s a lot of fun stuff in there.”

“No, I know about naughty pictures. The satellite array gets a few channels that do nothing but.” Rey didn’t know that, and it’s clear on her face. Rose waves that off. “You look at them with him?”

“Yeah. It’s fun. You and Finn don’t…”

“No…” Rose grins, thinking about... probably not tonight, she’s getting all done up, and putting her date night dress on, so she wants Finn thinking about no one but her, but maybe the time after. “But we might.”

 Rey smiles at that.

 

 

* * *

“How do you feel about light blue?” Mirina asks Rose a bit later.

Rose shrugs. “It’s a color?”

“Do you have a favorite color?” Tasha asks.

Rose shakes her head. “It’s uh… What color something is is never the sort of thing that’s been a consideration. Mammie gets fabric, she makes a jumper for Auntie Saria. That’s her youngest girl. She outgrows it in three months. Over to Auntie Clara, her oldest girl, it goes, and Auntie Clara gives it to my cousin Leilei. She outgrows it in three months. Over to Uncle Kimmo, his girl Jasmine gets it for three months… And on and on. I get it about six years after it was made, the color’s entirely washed out and it’s the softest fabric you’ve ever felt, but… I didn’t have non-hand-me-down clothing until I joined the Resistance, and then I was in uniform.”

It’s clear from the way Tasha and Mirina look at each other, they’ve never even begun to imagine a situation like that.

Rey nods along, though. “I scavenged everything I wore until the year before last. It feels really bizarre to be able to say, ‘Oh, I just don’t like that color.’ Feels really odd to even have that be a thing.”

“Where are you two from?” Tasha asks.

“Hays Minor,” says Rose, and both of the ladies wince. They know what happened to Hays Minor. Rey feels a surge of respect for Rose coming from Mirina. That after what happened to Hays Minor, she's here, supporting her friend nonetheless. 

“Jakku,” and this time they don’t wince, they share a look, and then stare at Rey, and share another look.

Mirina spends a moment really looking at Rey, before saying, gently. “Unless I’m sorely misreading you, you might want to answer that question in the future with, ‘From the Rim,’ or something similar.”

Rey almost inclines her head, but she feels R33, poke her to make sure she doesn’t. “Why?”

“People know what and who happened to Jakku. If you say that’s where you’re from, they’re going to assume you had him destroy it for you.”

Rose looks at all three of them. She knew, like everyone in the Resistance, that one day Jakku was just _gone._ She didn’t know what happened to it. And Rey is looking at her, seeing that whatever Finn’s told her about the four of them on Poe’s ship, he left that part out.

“He blew up Jakku,” Rose says, looking really alarmed.

Rey nods. “Yeah.”

“Why?”

She swallows. “I told you my parents sold me for a few bottles of rotgut there.”

Rose is nodding.

“That’s not where the story ends, you know?”

Rose winces. She knows what happens to girls left on their own. She knows what happens to female slaves. She knows what sorts of things she and Paige survived when the First Order troops came in. Knows what they did to get away. She hasn’t told Finn those stories, because she doesn’t know how he’d react, doesn’t know if he could handle knowing and not being able to do anything about it, doesn’t know if it’s a kindness to tell him something deeply upsetting that there’s beyond nothing he can do about.

Rey catches the thought and inhales fast and sharp, nods at her, and then says, “And I didn’t tell him, but Kylo… uh… felt it off of me… and handled it in an incredibly calm and even-handed sort of way.”

“He blew up the whole planet?” Rose says, again.

“Yeah.”   

“And then he started freeing slaves,” Rose adds, feeling pieces slipping into place.

“Not immediately thereafter, but yes.”

“Ah.”

Mirina and Tasha share a look. The Great Black Urus indeed.

 

 

* * *

It’s a while before anyone’s got something to say after that. Mirina flips her sketch pad around, and says, “What do you think, Rose? Suitable for playing to win?”

It’s a sketch of Rose, in a dress, a dress in a light, almost sparkling blue, with a neckline so low cut her belly button is practically on display, flowing into a wide, poofy skirt.

Rose is just staring at it, never, ever having imagined herself in something like that, and Rey is making herself grin, forcing herself to find some light here. “Finn’ll trip over his jaw if he sees you in that.”

Rose sniggers a bit, and then breaks into a full laugh. “He _really_ would.” She gestures to the deep-v neckline. “How do you… uh… stay in something like that?” Her date night dress has an awfully low neck, too, but… Well, occasionally falling out of it isn’t exactly a problem. In fact, that’s one of the things Finn really likes about that dress.

“Tape,” Tasha says. “Between the right undergarments and tape, you won’t fall out. Though every person in the room who likes women will be watching with eyes peeled, hoping to see it happen.” She eyes the dress again. “With your figure, and in a dress like that, you can just claim you won the hand, and they’ll all believe it because they won’t be able to look away from your chest.”

Rose blushes. And then laughs again. “Paige’ll likely be weaned by then. They might be a tad less impressive.”

Mirina shakes her head. “With the right bra, all things are possible.” Then she looks over to Rey. “Speaking of which, before we get started on your face, let’s get you into your dress, then we’ll cover you over with a sheet, and do the makeup. It’s fairly smudge proof, but I don’t want to risk the gown touching it when you put it on.”

 

 

* * *

Rey hadn’t immediately understood why Mirina had gone from bras to her getting dressed. And then, as she’s putting the outfit on, and it takes her, and Tasha, to get her into this _bra_ which is vastly more complicated than it needs to be, from the feel of it more complicated than the damn dress is, and… Okay… She has no idea how it can possibly do _that_ to her breasts, but… Well… She’s actually got breasts now, like, visible under her clothing breasts, with… cleavage… and… It’s not like she’s got a big waist, but compared to her hips and chest it’s pretty flat, and somehow this makes it seem like it curves in a bit, and… It feels like she shouldn’t be able to breathe, but she can, so… Okay, this is magic. That’s got to be it.

“How do I take this off?” she asks as Tasha’s doing something behind her with this thing.

Tasha waves that off. “I’m sure Kylo can handle it.”

Rey’s got a mental image of him just ripping it off, which… okay… actually… that might be kind of fun. Except she’s fairly sure she’ll never be able to wear it again if that happens, so…

Eh… She’ll see how tired and randy they are at the end of the night. It can’t be more complicated than the saree, and they got that off.

 

 

* * *

While she’s getting dressed, R33 is doing Rose’s hair. It’s putting a gentle wave into it.

“You and Finn doing something fun tonight?” Rey asks.

“I think he’s got something up his sleeve. I heard Magiit and Elias talking about babysitting.”

“Good,” Rey says as Tasha holds open the dress, and gestures for her to kneel. She does and Tasha settles it, gently, over Rey’s head, and as she stands it falls into place.

“Oh!” Rose says, just staring, eyes wide. “That’s…”

“It’s not stupid, right?”

“No…” She’s up, standing in front of Rey, staring, eyes wide. “Stupid’s not the word I was thinking.”

“Ravishing,” Tasha says. “Jon did good work on this one.”

Mirina nods, adjusting the shoulder piece a bit. “Yes, our boy did. Do a little spin. Let’s make sure it flares and settles right.”

Rey does, and the almost floating layers of fabric swirl around her before falling exactly where they belong.

The Frakes ladies grin. And Rose is just staring, then she blinks, hard, and says, “Oh.”

“It’s all right, isn’t it?” Rey asks. There’s something big and complicated going on in Rose’s head, but Rose doesn’t quite understand it, so Rey can’t either.

“It’s…” Rose keeps looking, licks her lips, and tries to put the thoughts and words together. “Uh… It…looks right. I… didn’t think… You look like you belong in it.”

 

 

“That’s good, right?”

“It’s…” She blinks again. “We know Padme’s Kylo, and we know, kind of, that he does this _thing,_ and it involves big ships and lots of power and… changing things… But we only see him back on Lirium, in his blacks, maybe teaching the kids lightsaber or Elias said Critt said something about cookies, or memories of fighting and danger, but… It’s fucking _real. You’re a queen._ ”

Rey blushes. “I think I’d rather be a teacher.”

Rose shakes her head, and then nods, and then just stares for a moment before saying, “If you can change the galaxy for the better, then you should. If you’d be a teacher, use this to teach. You can’t just… put this aside. Not when you can do so much good with it.”

Rey sighs. “I think I’ve got to be good at it, before I can do good with it.”

Mirina gives her a gentle whack to the back of the head. “Stop that. I’ve seen girls who didn’t have the sense the Force gave a fig wield power like maniacs, with new friends and new causes and new favorites every other day. Stay steady, know what your end goal is, know who your friends are, who your allies are, who wants you to succeed, who wants you to fail, and take your time to think and consult before you act, and you’ll be fine.”

Tasha adds, “You’re pretty, and young, and new. And if you can keep quiet about the mind reading bit, you can do a good job of figuring out who your allies are, and who your enemies are, and if you’re feeling like really getting into this, make sure you keep those enemies close, ask their advice frequently, find out what they want you to do, and why, and then spell that out to your friends so you can find out where the traps are, before you walk into them.”

Mirina looks to Rose and Rey, and then smiles, a wide, bright grin. “They will look at women like you, and underestimate you. They’ll assume because you weren’t raised to fly with the falcons, that you’ll be easy to manipulate. Use it. Let them try. And then, if you’d be a teacher, teach them to not underestimate you. Teach them how women who _survived_ play this game.”

Rose looks a little startled, because she might have been saying Rey’s got to play, but the idea that she might…

Mirina aims that smile at her. “Like you said, if you can change it… I take it you’re not attending this one, but next one, you will be here and I will dress you, and you will mix and mingle with your husband, both of you keeping your ears open, and you will help to guard your friend’s back, because no one changes anything all on their lonesome, but as a team, with friends…”

Rey’s eyeing both of them. Rose beats her to asking, “What do you get out of this?”

That smile doesn’t falter. “My son’s happiness and soaring career. A return to the promise of the Empire. A stable, suitable power-sharing arrangement between a functional senate and an executive branch with enough power to be useful. Cementing the fortunes of my girls. I won’t live forever, and if our brand is all over The Order, my daughters will never want for work. A legal system where more people thrive, so more people will be seeking my girls out for the favor of their work.” She glances to Rose. “I caught your discomfort at ‘rich people’ when I walked in. Fair enough, especially with your background, I certainly understand. But know this, under the Empire, there were tens of billions of people in my income band. Now there are hundreds of millions. The galaxy was richer, by a lot, under the Empire, and you don’t have to like rich people to see the advantage of billions of people joining their ranks. But if that doesn’t do it for you, when I was a girl there were hundreds of trillions of people in poverty, now there are tens of quadrillions, and the population hasn’t been growing that fast. People are getting poorer, because chaos breeds poverty.

“Stable markets. Stable laws. Stable property rights. The ability to write a contract and enforce it. Those make people rich, or at least well-off, and if not that, it keeps them fed. We had those under the Empire.”

“And prison planets, and slavery, and…” Rose says.

Mirina cuts her off, “Child, so did the Old Republic. It’s a well-kept secret, but so did the New Republic. The Senate put their enemies in jail. The Emperor put his enemies in jail. The New Republic put their enemies in jail. None of those jails were pleasant places. Any stable system will have people trying to destabilize it, and all of them will do whatever is necessary to make sure they don’t succeed. The only question is: how much collateral damage you’ll cause doing it. If you’re ‘good,’ it will be minimal. If you’re not, you’ll kill and maim willy-nilly as a way to discourage others from rising up.

“So, be good. Help your friend. Find out who the problems are and take them out before they become so big of a problem that taking them out causes collateral damage.”

Rose and Rey share a look, neither of them sure what to do with _that._

 

 

* * *

By the time Rey’s makeup is done, Rose also has her hair and makeup done, and her measurements taken, and a few dresses sketched, and has possibly been drafted into the Order, which is quite a bit more than she thought she was signing up for when she said yes to ‘getting ready.’

She’s not sure if she wants to run away, or not.

And she’s less sure, how, if she doesn’t run away, she’s going to explain this to Finn.

She really wants time to talk to Rey, alone. And she can feel Rey wants that, too.

As Mirina’s saying, “Okay, off to the refresher with you, take a moment to look at yourself, by yourself, and then back here,” Rey thinks to Rose, _Soon. You and I will talk, soon._

She jerks a little at the sound of her friend’s voice in her head, but then nods.

 

 

* * *

Rey’s been intentionally _not_ looking at herself in the mirror. And she can feel that’s part of why Mirina’s sending her into the refresher on her own, and not just poking her to look at the mirror across from the bed, is so she can take a moment on her own to see it.

So, on her own, swallowing, taking a deep breath, Rey opens her eyes in front of the mirror.

A shuddering breath goes galloping out of her lungs. She’s… Rose was right. It looks… She could have never imagined this, but… Right.

It feels… too… just… She doesn’t know. It’s not wrong, but it’s big and intense and different and… So much. So… different. And…

She takes another long, slow breath. She _survived._ She survived Jakku. She survived Snoke. She survived the Prateorian Guard. She… can do this…

Another deep breath. Maybe. She can do this… maybe.

“Hey, kid.”

 

 

She jerks a bit, hearing Han’s voice. She turns, and he’s leaning back against the shower door, looking cool and comfortable. His eyes trail up and down her, and he half-grins, half-smirks. “Never let it be said the Solo men didn’t pick _fine_ women. Damn!”

She blushes, and wants to throw her arms around him in a great hug, and tears are threatening to form in her eyes and she did not just spend an hour getting her makeup done to ruin it by crying and…

“Hey,” he says, holding his hands up. “None of that.”

“How… why… You’re here?”

“For the moment.”

“Why?”

“Because I can remember sitting in the refresher in what I thought was a beyond over-the-top, stupid-as-fuck suit, with twenty garish, jingly little medals on it, I didn’t even know what half of them were for, talking myself up to attending one of these things, sure I was going to fuck it up at least seventy different ways before we got through the receiving line.”

She sighs at that. It feels _good_ to have someone else _really_ get it.

He steps closer, and if he could touch, he would. “You’re not going to fuck it up.” He shrugs. “Or you will. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. It’s so much more important in your head than it is outside of it.”

She’s got a really skeptical look on her face.

“Yeah, I felt that way, too. Leia told me that. Lando told me that. But… It felt _huge_ to me because it was _me._ And it always looked, to me, like they knew what they were doing, and I felt like a barely-trained pony chewing the centerpieces, embarrassing the hell out of her.

“And I’d pick fights with her, in public, because it was easier to be angry than embarrassed.

“And that actually _did_ embarrass her, because no one really cares if you use the wrong fork, or call someone Lord instead of Highness, but they sure as hell care if you get drunk and start yelling about something stupid.” He offers her a lopsided half smile. “You know what the kicker was?”

She shakes her head.

“I wanted her to succeed, because it was important. And I wanted her to fail, because the more she succeeded the less important I became. I’d cling to her because I was afraid. And I’d push her away because I was afraid. And it was easier to fight with her about trivial shit than it was to be honest about what was going on. And it was easier to do what I was good at, and not really help her, than it was to do something hard and scary, and actually help her.” He would hold her hand if he could. “So, you get to pick how this works out. You can’t control the people out there, but you can control you, and probably 90% of succeeding will be based on that.”

She sighs. “I know that. I do, really, but…”

“Yeah, but. Trust me, _I’ve been there._ So, you going to pick a fight with him?”

“No,” she looks horrified at that idea.

“Yell at him or get really snippy and sarcastic?”

“Of course not!”

“Get into a snit if he talks to another woman for more than five minute and then hit him with it every time you get into a fight for the next year.”

She looks appalled at that.

“Then take it from someone who _knows,_ you’re going to do fine. If you don’t do those things, everyone in the room is _not_ staring at you the whole, or even most, of the time. Most of them are there for their own reasons, and to be seen by the other people there. Yes, they’ll look and talk about you and him, but… You’re just part of the show, not the whole thing.

“Relax, enjoy it, enjoy him and try to remember why you’re doing this, and you will be _okay._ ”

Rey nods, and smiles a little, and she wishes she could touch Han so much right now, and his little smile says he’d really like to give her a long hug, too.

“All right, kid, go get ‘em.” And then he’s gone.

 

 

* * *

Rey straightens her shoulders, checks the mirror one more time, and then steps out into Kylo’s rooms.

And a moment later, Kylo and Jon step in from the other door.

 


	63. The Last Night

 

12/31/1 

 

 

There’s literally not a single word in Kylo’s head when he steps into his room. The sight of Rey took them all away and all he can do is stare at her in mute wonder. And for as much as he’s not about to be an Emperor, he knows what he’s seeing, _his_ Empress, standing, waiting for him.

He blinks a few times, and tries to speak, but… There’s nothing.

Jon crosses the room, bends his lips to Rey’s ear, and whispers something. She smiles at it, glances to Rose, who is grinning from ear to ear, and then smiles at _him_ and… Jon’s mom and sister are looking very smugly pleased… And he can’t move, or think, or… anything. He just wants to be here and watch. He’s seen every ugliness the galaxy has to offer, and to have a moment to stand in the presence of ethereal beauty…

He doesn’t really notice the others leaving. He just knows that at one point they had guests, and at another they were alone.

He licks his lips, feeling like he should say _something_ but… there just aren’t words.

She’s smiling brighter as he draws closer, something of a smirk on her lips, and a bright twinkle in her eyes. “He said you’d go speechless.”

Kylo nods. He licks his lips, and swallows, and he’s on his knees before he’s given it a thought. He’s knelt before, to masters who didn’t deserve him, who didn’t want anything good for him, for lies and promises never to be kept. And now, he’s here, before his _queen._ His lady, his love, his light, his _wife._ His life and future all bound up and twined through her Force and his and if anyone, anything was ever worth him on his knees, this is it.

 

 

He reaches for her hands, beaming up at her, something deeper, and more settled than joy, but just as bright and attentive pouring off of him. Rey steps to him, not entirely sure what to do with him kneeling in front of her. This is… he’s awash in so many emotions, and they’re flowing through him, through her, and her eyes are starting to tear up, which is killing her because she’s got no idea if the stuff they put on her face will still be there if she starts to cry, and now’s not a time to cry, now’s happy, but somehow happy feels like it needs to leak out of her face, and he’s still staring up at her, eyes soft, bright, no words, not yet, but _feelings…_ So many feelings.

She traces his face with her right hand, fingers caressing his cheek and jawline as he gazes up at her.

She’s watching him. She’s seen his traditional command blacks, and his full battle gear, but this is different. Black trousers, black shoes, a fitted black jacket that covers from just below his chin to his hips. The cut is simpler than his command blacks. No gathers on the sleeves. The detailing subtler, more black on black, with just flashes of silver metal to brighten things up, and a line of white trim on the edges of his jacket and along the leg of his pants. There’s a blaze of gray at his throat, the same fabric on Rey’s dress. On his cuffs there’s a deeper, darker black, but it’s got a sheen to it, and when the light hits right it glows a subtle green. His cloak has trim of white and the same gray that’s on her dress.

It’s very him. Clearly made by Jon, and clearly made for him, and between this and his new command blacks, the ideal of The Master is starting to settle in her mind. 

He’s wearing his hair down, soft and loose tumbling over his shoulders and back. No gloves. She can see his hands and the ring she placed upon him. A quick sniff tells her he’s decided to see what happens when he uses the cologne that’s been sitting on the shelf in his bathroom for months. She doesn’t know what the scent is, warm… it puts her in mind of… sunset maybe, sunset in a forest… though the idea that there’s a scent to sunset makes her feel silly. 

He pulls her closer, holding her, his face pressed to her belly, hands on her hips, as she pets his face.

 

 

She smiles at him. “I like this, Master Ren.”

He shivers at the sound of that. Of _her_ calling him by his rank, and meaning it. He kisses her tummy, and then her hand, each of her fingers. His lips linger on her ring. That’s when he remembers he has a present for her, and stands up.

He’s finally able to find his voice. “I have something, for you.”

“A small something?” she asks, voice light. She doesn’t get a lot of presents, and the idea excites her, but he’s not obviously holding anything, so it’s got to be small enough to fit into a pocket.

“Something small.” He feels the thrum of her excitement, and makes a mental note to get her presents more often, then walks her to the mirror, standing her in front of it. And then lets go. “Close your eyes.” She does, an amused look on her face, as he goes to his bed, pulling out one of the drawers below it to find the tiny bag. It’s exactly where he left it. He takes it in hand, feeling the soft weight of the satin in his palm, and then walks to stand behind her. His fingers land on her shoulders, brushing gently over her skin. His lips follow his fingers, trailing along the line of her shoulder and throat.

She shivers at that.

He smiles against her shoulder. Then takes the necklace out of its satin bag, and drapes it around her neck, clasping it into place. There’s a palpable thrill in being able to do it, and an even deeper one that comes from seeing it on her throat.

“Open your eyes.”

She does, and for a moment she’s just looking. Then a smile slowly spreads across her face as her finger lightly strokes the symbol. It’s her spiral in his hexagon, both of their symbols merged, and meant to be worn above her heart.

“It’s beautiful, Kylo.”

He nods. He pulls her closer, so she’s pressed to him, back to front, his eyes meeting hers in the mirror and he says, gently, “Lady Ren, Mistress of the Order of the Maji.” He kisses her shoulder again. Kisses where her throat blends to shoulder, and the point of her shoulder, and lifts her hand to his lips. “Blend your mark with mine. Spend your days and nights with me. Rule by my side when we’re here, and when we’re on Lirium, I’ll teach Maji how to fight and how to handle their dark. Be my wife and my queen and my love, and do it where everyone can see. And I’ll be your husband, consort, and dark balance, for all the galaxy to see. We’ll raise our children and build the galaxy we want them to live in. You and I, together, to the end of our days.”

 

 

She shivers at that, feeling the weight of it, and the immediate flash of that future. Of both Lady Ren, Mistress of the Order of the Maji, in silks and satins, ruling, and Master Kylo, in his casual blacks, training younger Maji how to be dark, without letting it eat them alive. Of him openly in her space, and her openly in his, and both of them, together, twining into each other, blending those spaces into one.

Balanced.

The way they were meant to be.

She turns in his arms and kisses him, long and sweet. Makeup be damned.

And a bit later, they find out that, apparently, it’s water and smudge-proof. 

 

 

* * *

Rey knows that there are things they do before getting ready to stand in the line. She takes Rose home, and Finn, seeing Rose prettied up, has a reaction fairly similar to how Kylo reacted to her. And that pleases her to no end.

Magiit, who’s apparently been dragooned into babysitting whistles at both of them, which, where she comes from, is some sort of compliment.

And Marina and Tasha head off to their rooms to get ready for tonight. Jon goes with them.

She and Kylo eat something, small for supper, big for a snack. Dinner will be late, and Jon says it’s a good idea to eat before these things. Rey wouldn’t know, but she’s in favor of eating. Kylo has a small glass of wine with this thing that isn’t exactly a snack or meal, which surprises her, but supposedly Jon thinks it’s a good idea, so she’s not arguing. She doesn’t have any for herself, though.

All of it passes in something of a fog. The party is getting closer, and she’s getting jittery.

Kylo holds her hand, tries to wash her in a balm of quiet.

It helps, some.

 

 

* * *

Kylo’s eyes light up a bit when Grand Marshall Kinear and his wife approach them. They’ll be accompanying them in the receiving line in twenty minutes, when the guests begin joining them. But right now is just the four of them in Kylo’s office. “These are the ones I wanted you to meet. Grand Marshall and Lady Kinear.”

Rey extends her hand, and Kinear holds it, leaning in to gently kiss her cheek as his lady bows. “Lady…” he leads, awaiting her name.

“Rey… Just Rey.”

 

Kinear draws back, gently stroking the back of her hand, and says quietly. “Not here. Never here. Be ‘just Rey’ in the privacy of your chambers. Here, you need a name and a title. Even if you would be Lady Rey, that’s fine, but use your name as a shield.” Then he pulls back, gives her hand a gentle squeeze as if he’d just taken it the first time, and says, “Lady…”

Rey thinks, glances at Kylo, _You really want that wedding?_

 _Yes._ One word, thought to her, shuddering with want and aching beauty.

And then says, “Amidala,” instead of Ren.

Kinear stares at her for a moment. His wife does, too. They look to each other. It’s been months since Kinear noticed that Ben Solo changed his ‘official name’ and took a wife. A few hours after that, Ellie confirmed that Amidala had to have been Ben, and not Rey. They let it lie, because neither of them thought either Amidala would be dumb enough to actually _use_ the damn thing anywhere that could be tracked to them.

“That’s a name, all right,” Ellie says, with a small smile and a bit of a sigh.

“A storied name. I think, should I spend a million years, I’d never come up with a name like that, by chance,” Kinear nods, slowly.

His wife adds, “That’s the sort of name one has to _mean_.”

They look from Kylo to Rey again, but in that neither of them immediately leaps to come up with a new name, he glances to his wife and she nods, then he says, “May I tell you a story? It’s often the prerogative of old men to tell stories, and this one may be of interest to you.”

Rey nods. She can feel the tension, but also wants to know the story. “Certainly.”

“There was, a long time ago, in a part of the galaxy that feels far, far away, a beautiful woman from Naboo. Padme Naberrie, who, when she gained her rank, chose as her nom de rex, Amidala. That was, if you’ll allow the comparison, her shield. She kept Naberrie for herself, hidden away. She had been, in her youth, the Queen of Naboo, and she proved to be a wise one. Royalty in Naboo is an elected position, chosen from a collection of appropriately well-connected and wealthy houses. When her term as Queen was up, she joined the Senate of the Republic as one of the representatives from Naboo.

“Now, long, long ago, the Senate noticed that it was having issues. Many issues, and that, due to the nature of its charter, it could not deal with those issues for it had no military might.

“The senate hemmed and hawed and fussed and moaned, but eventually, it voted to raise a military. Senator Amidala was one of the voices against the creation of a military, she felt that concentrated military power would set bad things into motion. She knew that a sword in the hand of a protector can also be turned upon those who are being protected. And she wasn’t wrong, but as is the nature of a democracy, she was outvoted.”

He gestures to himself and his lady. “Some of us got our start back then.

“Senator Amidala was always a peacemaker, and as things got darker, and more dangerous, she was a light. She wanted less power, fewer weapons, and a galaxy of people who’d gather and talk through their differences.

“But galaxies rarely work that way, and in the end, those troops were needed to keep the peace.”

Lady Kinear adds, “She died during the fall of the Jedi. There were… rumors among the Ladies of the Senate and their _friends_ that she had been with child. And those of us who pay attention to such things know that Naboon _fashion_ leans toward _long, flowing gowns_ , but no gown ever made covers a near-term gravid woman thoroughly enough to hide the bump. Especially, not if that woman is pregnant with _twins._ And for those of us who were among the intimates of the Chancellor’s mistress, there were _scandalous_ rumors that the father had been one of the Jedi, and when the Jedi were purged, she and the children had been collateral damage. That her knight went to his death to protect her, and failed.”

Both Kinears stare long and hard at both of them. Apparently it’s, still, not quite clear enough.

Pat takes over on the story, “And there were a few rumors, barely hints of whispers, that her Jedi had not died in the purge, and that she had not been collateral damage. But that in his rage, when he found she could not be turned to his side, he had ended her life, and the life of their children.”

He looks from the one to the other. It’s clear that this isn’t exactly news to either Amidala. It’s also clear that they aren’t seeing the bigger picture here.

“Of course, for those of us who’d heard the barely hints of a whisper, when a young Jedi named Skywalker showed up twenty years later…” He lets that dangle, and again looks between them.

Ellie adds, “And, of course, a few years after that, as the New Republic began to take shape, the world found out that Skywalker had a sister.”

Kinear takes over, “And those of us who were paying attention learned that said sister lost her position as Queen of Alderaan, and the chance at First Senator, because someone else who knew Skywalker’s father used it as a blade to her throat.”

Both Kinears stare at Kylo and Rey, and are rapidly coming to the conclusion that those discreet and gentle lessons on how politics work better start in the next minute and a half, because neither of those two appear to be putting this together, yet.

Kinear leans in, and kisses Rey’s cheek. “Now, if you be Lady Amidala, then he would be Lord Amidala.” He pulls back, holding her hands, looking for all the world like a charming, old grandfather.

“And it is traditional among the Naboon, to take the name of whichever spouse has the highest rank. And while Jedi Master is impressive, former Queen outranks that by a light year,” Ellie adds. “Now, back when it happened, there were barely fifty people in the know. Probably fewer. And now, more than fifty years later, I’d assume that number is fewer than ten. And likely, there are exactly five people on the _Supremacy_ who know that name.”

Her husband takes over, “That said, if either of you intends to use it, know what kind of statement you are making by doing so. Just because the numbers are few, doesn’t mean they’re zero, and the ones who can make the connections will make them and will _not_ be silent about them.”

Lady Kinear says, “So, Lady…”

Rey’s eyes don’t flicker, she holds Ellie’s gaze as Kylo says, “Amidala.”

Kinear grins, but it doesn’t get to his eyes. Time to see how well these two can be taught. “Well…” He sighs, too. “Make sure you let Frakes know what you’re doing. In about six months, at the most, it’ll all be out. And decide, in advance, what, if anything you’re going to do about Naboo and what’s left of the Alderaanians. Once this gets out, they’re going to get nervous about you attempting to stake a claim on either or both of them.”

Ellie look up at both of them, feeling satisfied with this. If they’ll be bold, then they’ll be _bold._ She can see the pieces falling into play, and… “It’s an interesting strategy. Make your claim by both sword and blood. There’s nothing like the allure of ‘royalty’ to help cement a position. For some reason, people seem to like the idea that some people are touched by the Gods or Force and made to rule. Royal bloodline, Force powers, you probably are just about as close as anyone can get to making a legitimate claim of divine right of rule.”

This would be the point where Kylo and Rey start to go pale, _finally_ getting the hint of how badly this could spin out of control.

Kinear adds, also starting to see some of the angles on this play, warming up to them, and if they can do it… Maybe he and Ellie were a bit hasty on the idea of not backing this play. “That said, I don’t suppose there’s proof, anywhere that Amidala actually married her Jedi?”

That’s not a direction either of them were thinking of taking this. Kylo saying Amidala was mostly just hammering home the point that Rey is _his._ And Rey was using it for the same reason. A marker of family and belonging that still left a ‘formal’ wedding in play.

Both of them are rapidly starting to see the issues as Kylo finally says, “I don’t know about proof. He said they married on Naboo.”

This would be when Ellie and Pat both look at each other, startled, because, as best they know the ‘he’ in question has been dead Kylo’s entire life, and then some. They both, visibly, decide not to touch it. If Vader’s still lurking around out there, they’re _significantly_ better off not knowing that. “A blood test would take care of any questions along those lines. Amidala had a sister, and she had children, so if you match your ‘cousins’ that would shut down any whispering about making a claim you can’t back up.”

Ellie sniggers a little, as she works through the lines of that. “The Queens of Naboo have to be female, under the age of twenty-five, of the correct lineage, and beyond financially well-off and politically connected, so, obviously, you, personally, aren’t a threat to the status quo, not from that direction, but if there is ever a black-haired, dark-eyed baby girl with the name Ren, she’d be in the running for election as the Queen of Naboo.”

“And, should said child be born, about two days after the news gets to Naboo, there will be people working on setting her up for said election,” Kinear adds. _Whether you want it or not,_ is left unspoken.

“And of course what’s left of the Alderaanians have been squabbling since the planet was destroyed over who can ‘legitimately’ claim their throne. Since Ransolm took your mother out of the running, no one has been able to properly cement their hold, and if Prince Ben of Alderaan were to pop up again…” Ellie says.

Pat says, “They’ve finally found a new home world, and I imagine you wouldn’t have too much difficulty getting an alliance with the houses currently out of favor in exchange for retaking your throne.”

“You’ve even got long enough hair for the braids. Most of them, at least the ones not currently in power, would be happy to see you,” Ellie says.

Rey and Kylo look at each other. Both of them are getting the unspoken context that using Amidala is going to complicate the hell out of this.

Rey sighs, holds her hand out again, and says, “Mistress Rey of the Maji.”

Both Kinears beam approval at her. Ellie takes her hand and pats it gently. “And you thought you’d be bad at this.” She waves the idea away like it’s ridiculous. “It’s just a matter of learning the angles and seeing how things can ricochet. We’ll have you dancing through these waters in no time!”

 

 

* * *

“Have you been out there, yet?” Ellie asks a moment later.

Kylo nods. “They exiled me off to Jon’s rooms to get ready.”

She looks expectantly at Rey, who shakes her head. “Come, Mistress, this is the best part. A few minutes to just enjoy it with people you actually want to spend time with.” She takes Rey’s hand in hers and leads her into the throne room.

The last time she was in here, the throne was still in the middle, and everything was black, and…

Now, it’s just… _not._

The floor, the struts, the walls, those are, of course, still black. The sky beyond, well, the _Supremacy_ is currently located to provide the _best_ possible view of the Oleean Nebula, swirling around beyond them in pinks and oranges.

The throne is gone, and in it’s place…

She feels Kylo’s hand slip into hers, and there’s a wash of… pride maybe, satisfaction, definitely, at being able to give this to her, as they walk over to the installation. “I don’t know how Jon got them, but…”

It’s a… sculpture maybe. Shimmering orbs filled with water, with jewel toned fish flitting about in them, and softly flowing trickles of water dripping into the orbs below them. Each one has flowers of striking vibrant oranges and reds and violets floating on the surface. The water drips slowly, each drop calibrated to provide a soft musical rhythm, and each orb is shaped to provide a different note.

She’s reaching out for it, when Threepio’s voice cuts through her, “Mistress Rey, no! There’s a containment field around that.” He’s shuffling over as quickly as he can. “Those flowers are deeply toxic to a half dozen of the delegations coming to this, so we had to keep them contained.” He turns toward one of the myriad droids moving around the space, getting the last-minute pieces into place. “Why isn’t this roped off yet?”

The droid whirls and beeps and Rey’s got the sense that the answer is “those idiots are ten minutes early, and the rope’s not coming for another six minutes,” but she’s not sure about that.

Threepio listens to it, nods, and says, “It better well happen that way.” And the droid beeps at him again. “Good.” Once the droid scurries off, and Threepio is satisfied that the rope is coming, he takes the time to really look at Rey, and he can’t smile, but, she has the sense of it. “You look lovely, my Lady.”

“Threepio…”

“We are not on Lirium, and I would not dream of calling you Rey, here.” He glances slightly behind her, where the Kinears are ‘taking in the view.’ He’s pointedly not looking at Kylo, something a feat, given he’s a half-step behind Rey with his hand on her back.

“Fine. _General,_ ” she says with an amused voice. 

That gets some very amused beeping, as R2 rolls up. Then he beeps some more, apparently he’s willing to greet Kylo, even if Threepio won’t. Kylo nods at him, and says, “Yes, thank you.”

_Your father would swallow his tongue if he saw you promoted Goldie over there to a general._

Kylo sniggers a little at that. “That’s likely true.”

_You’re not sending him into battle, are you?_

“It’s a diplomatic rank. If he ends up commanding a fleet it means that literally every other officer on board is dead, so…”

R2 beeps what Rey considers a snigger. Threepio makes a slightly annoyed sound, and then says, “Come R2, we’ve still got the final check of the catering team on the _Finalizer._ ”

Once they’ve left, the Kinears drift back over. Ellie nods to the door, where the Schiffs are entering. “Five minutes to go.”

 

 

* * *

“What’s first?” Rey asks.

“Receiving line. We stand here and say hello to everyone,” Kylo replies. He can see the droids getting ready to open the doors. And behind them Schiff and his wife are also coming up, ready to join the line.

The expression she has aimed at him makes him smile. “We do this why?”

“So they can all say they got to speak with us,” Kylo replies.

That expression doubles down. (And appears to be amusing the Grand Marshall and his wife to no end. Both of them know that the Kinears can’t think at each other, but the _this is going to be fun_ vibe coming off of Ellie is apparently strong enough that even Pat can get it.)

She breaks it long enough to be introduced to Grand Admiral Schiff and his wife, but picks it back up as they wait for the doors to open, and everyone else entering, to come to them.

_And all of them speaking to us matters why?_

Kylo half-smiles at her, looking at the doors, hearing the sounds on the other side, people coming close, waiting for those doors to open. He’s feeling a tinge of nervous. He’s not sure if it’s his or hers though. He does reach out and take her hand.  _Because, apparently being_ human _and_ approachable _makes people comfortable and more likely to want to work with us._

Rey squeezes his hand, and it’s clear that some of the nervous is him, but a lot of it is her. She takes a deep breath, and thinks to him, _Okay._

_Okay._

 

__

* * *

And then the doors open.

It’s not as bad as she was afraid. Part of that is that though she feels like she’s faking this, she’s also aware that the people looking at her are mostly curious or envious. None of them are staring at her like she’s got no right to be here.

She’s surprised how many people who see her are annoyed to see her. She can feel Kylo is, too. Apparently, three out of every five people who are in this line have rapidly withering designs on planting someone of their own choosing into the position of Mistress Ren. Seeing her standing there is annoying to them. A hitch in many, many plans.

But, since she’s being introduced as Mistress Rey of the Maji, they’re not entirely certain if it’s a done deal or not.

Both of them can feel a lot of plans being rearranged, quickly.

She sees more than a few women go from focusing their intentions on catching Kylo to worming their way into Rey’s inner circle. If Kylo’s already off the market, securing a place in his lady’s favor gives them access to the Order, while maintaining an opening for a marriage link with another power.

Some of them are coolly eyeing Rey, sure they can supplant her.

It only takes three of them actively thinking about how to wedge themselves between Kylo and Rey before Kylo’s moved a step closer to Rey and puts his arm around her shoulder. He’s known for not shaking hands to begin with, so keeping his left hand on her, and nodding at people, with her gently making skin to skin contact with the people in the line seems to work just fine. While also making it _extremely_ clear why she’s in the line, and that these women have _no_ shot of moving into her place.

When the Frakes enter, Lady Frakes and Spiner, escorted by Jon, he sees them, and smirks at it. Mirina says something, voice low, to Jon, who just chuckles, and then nods, and telegraphing he’s going to do it a good half minute before he does, gently takes Rey’s hands, kisses her cheek, giving him a chance to easily whisper to both of them, “Hold each other’s hand. She’s not in any danger, so you don’t need to defend her or literally hold her to your body. It comes off like you’re afraid someone’s about to snatch her away.”

 

 

Then Jon pulls back, and moves toward Kylo, making it _extremely_ clear that he’s supposed to shake his hand, so Kylo does, and doesn’t wrap his arm around Rey again, _then_ Jon moves on.

His mother is in line behind him. She greets Rey, and like her son, kisses her cheek and squeezes her hands, and then says, a with a touch more volume than is strictly necessary, “Now, I’ll be seeing you about dress designing, soon, correct?”

Rey’s not entirely sure what’s happening here, but she can feel Mirina is doing this intentionally, so, “Yes, of course. After the commotion from the First Year parties have died down.”

“Excellent, my dear. I want you thinking about color schemes and themes. State weddings are complicated, but a good dress helps to pull everything together.”

“I will.” Rey doesn’t add a question to the end of that, though she halfway wants to, no idea what Mirina means by ‘themes.’

Mirina looks up at her, eyes, bright. “I look forward to it.” She gives Rey’s hands one last squeeze, and then kisses Kylo’s cheek, though she has to raise up on her tiptoes, and he has to bend down a little, for her to do it, and then she’s holding Ellie’s hands, both of them smiling and chatting like old friends.

And that one action kills a good three quarters of the plans of people attempting to find a way to squeeze a different woman into Kylo’s embrace. If Madam Frakes has already been retained, the deal is done, and all that’s left is the party.

 

 

* * *

It’s an interesting experience. Five hundred people, as an abstract number, especially, if say, you personally (or your dearest love) happens to command more than six million of them, really doesn’t feel like a lot.

But when you’ve got to stand in place and say hello to each of them…

It’s _three hours_ of just greeting people. And it’s not like they really get to spend any time with any of them. That’s just long enough for them to introduce themselves, say something like, ‘Hello,’ or ‘Pleasure to meet you,’ and then boom, onto the next one.

Rey’s legs are tired, her back hurts, and she’s got _no idea_ how the Kinears, each of them well over ninety, are doing this.

Kylo’s understanding why Jon was so upset that he blew a hole in his party plan, because yes, he _never_ wants to do this again if he can at all possibly avoid it.

There’s food. It smells good. They occasionally get glimpses of it as it travels through the room on trays carried by server droids. They don’t get to eat it.

There are droids with drinks, circling around. The drinks look tasty. Tall fluted glasses of black-stemmed sparkling crystal, some with what’s clearly wine, others with a light green or light pink concoction in them. Both of them are thirsty and would like a drink, but a drink would break the rhythm of greeting people.

Rey’s hand hurts. She thinks Kylo’s got the right idea with not shaking hands. Even just a gentle grasp over and over and over and over and over and over and… It feels oddly swollen and tender. (Though she’s got more of an understanding as to why Tasha was so adamant about her hands being soft, and smooth, and _perfect._ )

They’re about half way through when Kylo thinks at her. _I will never, ever make us do this again._

_Thank you._

 

 

* * *

On the upside, Han is absolutely right. Yes, while they’re saying hello, people are watching them. And from time to time after that. But once they get out of the line, the guests get food, and drinks, and talk to each other, and look at the flowers and the fountain in the center, and actually seem to be having a good time.

Many of them are here to be seen. Not necessarily by Kylo or Rey, but by the people around them. This is a status show for a lot of them, they were invited, they are here, they are showing off how lux and well-connected they are. Their position in the eyes of Ren is only a small part of the game.

 _Right?_ Kylo thinks to her, catching her thought. After all, it’s not like saying ‘Hello’ over and over takes much thought. Though, probably both of them could be doing a better job of remembering the names that go with each face.

_He came by to give me a pep talk._

_Did it help?_

_Some._

* * *

The elevator brings people in small numbers. Six to eight at a time. Finally, it opens again, this time with just Jon in it. He waves them in, and with a massive sigh of relief the six of them get in.

One floor up is supposed to be storage. Right now Jon’s got cushy chairs, food, drinks, and what looks like those manicure boxes his mom had.

“Dinner’s still forty-five minutes off. Crash, relax, take advantage of—“ Ellie’s already slipping off her shoes and putting her feet into one of the boxes as she collapses in the nearest chair with a groan, “the massage boxes,” Jon says.

“When did we get so damn old?” she says to Pat, who smirks, and groans, loud, as he lowers himself into a chair taking a drink for both of them.

Schiff is rolling his shoulders. His neck pops loudly as he stretches. “The Emperor used to make us stand in formation for hours at a time, but I _forgot_ how hard that is.”

Lady Schiff has already gone in search of the refresher, and Rey’s thinking that’s a good plan. Though… sitting… She slumps into a chair.

Kylo’s eyeing the food as he sits, takes his shoes off, and decides that if Ellie’s doing it, it’s probably smart, so he pulls his boots off and slips his feet into one of the boxes, too. A little shiver slips through him, as the box whirrs to life, that feels _really_ good on his sore feet.

He nudges Rey, and she does, too, with a pleased groan. “Do we get to actually _eat_ at the dinner?”

Jon grins. “Oh, yeah, but… It takes a long time to get everyone served, and sometimes the food’ll be cool by the time you get it, so…”

Kylo looks up at him. “You look like you’ve been enjoying this.”

Jon grins back at him. “Oh, I have.” He’s beaming, and Kylo does his best to pretend he doesn’t know why. He hands Kylo a plate to share with Rey, and each of them a beverage. “Eat. Drink. You’re expected to have a bite or two of everything that hits your plate at the dinner, and a sip of everything in your glass, but everyone sitting with you has hosted one of these things, so they understand snacks.”

Kylo eyes the drink. It’s pink and doesn’t smell like much beyond sweet and fruity, but with Jon giving it to him… “What’s in there?”

“In yours, twenty mls of vodka in a mix of cranberry, cucumber, and lime juice. Just juice for you, Rey. I wasn’t sure how to calibrate just enough alcohol to keep you feeling comfortable, but not get you too much.”

Ellie sniggers at that. “The downside of being tiny. It’s hard to get ‘just enough’ to take the edge off. I found five mls an hour tended to do the job well enough. Or, if I was going to be somewhere I couldn’t drink, methylgarfacine, say ten mgs would do the job.”

“Wasn’t that illegal under the Empire?” Schiff asks, shooting his drink straight down, unconcerned about how much alcohol might be in it.

“Of course.” Kinear says, “The Emperor didn’t like it because it side effects included making it hard to tell if someone was lying. If you took too much you’d be so relaxed your body wouldn’t give off any lying tells. Just a little though, and suddenly dealing with hostile strangers isn’t a big deal.”

Rey’s looking between her and Jon, not getting it. Kylo had told her that Jon wanted him drinking a little, but she’d been focusing too much on the dinner ahead to ask why.

“Alcohol helps with social anxiety,” Jon says. “We spent some time figuring out how much to give him. You’re so small… I mean, we can try, but…”

She looks at Kylo, who has been pretty smiley for something like this. “That’s why you’re in such a good mood?”

He shrugs. Given what they’re doing, he’s in an amazing mood. “Mostly it’s that I’m doing this with you. That you’re really here and it’s… going better than I thought it would, and…” _you’re here and I love you and you’re HERE and thank you!_ He caresses the back of her hand and sips his drink. “This just… like Ellie says, takes the edge off. Makes me feel a little less nervous, so I don’t bleed it over to you.”

The Schiffs and Kinears are deeply interested in that. Or will be when they think about it later. Right now, they’re resting, because this is just the first leg of the race, and there’s five more hours to go.

 

 

* * *

Food helps, drinks help, foot rubs help.

But eventually, it’s time to get back up, go through the party, and lead everyone onto the _Finalizer_ for dinner.

 _Jon’s really good at this._ Kylo’s thinking. Partly because everything is pretty. In a way things associated with him just generally _aren’t._ Partly because he can feel the people around him, and they are, for the most part, having a good time. And partly because having the _Finalizer_ pull up, dock, and then crossing onto it, the entire top observation deck set for dinner, is just _impressive._

 _He really is._ Rey’s impressed, too. This is just… supple and elegant and, yes, it feels odd to be in the middle of this, but it’s _good._  

They’re the last ones to be seated. Everyone else had headed in, and once again, they’re behind closed doors, waiting to go in.

As they’re about to enter the dining room, Rey remembers a conversation they had a long time ago. She says to him, quietly. “It’s not a ballroom, right?”

That makes him remember the conversation, too.

“No.” He offers her a smile through the Force. _But it could be. Could be a wedding with dancing among the stars. How surprised to you think Poe would be if flirting with my honor guard actually results in getting kissed back?_

She smirks at that. _How surprised do you think Jon would be to be flirted with?_

_Oh, I’ve got some stories about that for later. But, I’d say, he’d be just about as surprised as you are to wake up in the morning with me next to you._

_So, not at all._

_Not at all. Apparently, if we can’t see him, he’s off tearing through the guests._

_Wait… you mean?_ Her eyes go wide.

_Exactly._

_Here?_

_He tells me he built a bunch of blind corners into the set up so he could do it and still hear the party._

Rey smiles, brightly at him, trying not to laugh. _A while back, I told Poe that he could bring a lover to Lirium. That it wouldn’t be an issue. He told me he’d bring a boy over for dinner round about the time we hosted one._

She feels Kylo snigger at that. _So, we’re providing dinner and the boy?_

_Maybe._

The doors open, and they step in, faced with a huge collection of tables stretching from one end of the _Finalizer’s_ observation deck to the other. Upon seeing them, everyone stands, and _waits,_ for Kylo, still holding Rey’s hand, to lead her to their seats, pull the chair out for her (though he uses the Force to do it, and she mentally smirks at him for showing off) and then waits for her to sit before seating himself.

Once they’re seated the volume rises, and the dinner begins.

 

 

* * *

Threepio is intentionally off to the side. He wanted a good view of this moment, and he wanted to share it with Artoo and the slew of memories only he could understand.

 _They clean up good,_ Artoo beeps softly.

Threepio nods. “They do.” He’s… not sure how to feel about this. About all of it. About how he feels like he’s simultaneously watching Leia’s dearest hope for the future, and her greatest fear. How he feels like he might be nurturing it, and stabbing her in the guts at the same time.

It’s not _Ben_ up there, holding his wife’s hand, leading his people into a coalition to span the future and unite… everyone interested in unity. It should be Leia, and Luke and Han, and maybe, somewhere, off to the side with the rest of the New Jedi, Ben would be mingling about, helping to smooth the waters for his mother…

But this… This was never supposed to happen.

 _Ben_ wasn’t supposed to have things like a wife, or a government, or formal dinners in his honor or…

 _Do you think they’d be proud?_ Artoo asks. Threepio can’t not hear Artoo’s memories of his time with Luke, and all of the things Ben was supposed to be.

“I don’t know,” Threepio says. “Do you?”

_Humans are weird, so I don’t know about them. I’m proud. Compared to the angry kid he was, this is so much better. Compared to the future Luke used to stay up late fearing, this is… beyond so much better. A billion times better. Compared to his grandfather… There aren’t numbers big enough for that._

Threepio inclines his head. “That’s probably a good way to look at it.” Compared to Leia’s nightmares… There aren’t words for how much better this is. “I wish… I could have seen her see this.” If Leia could have been here for this, could have approved, that would have gone a long way to making Threepio feel more settled. Less like he’s just stabbed all of his people in the back for the sake of a shiny new rank and the ability to order people around in his own right.

R2’s visor twists, his version of nodding. _Me, too. And seen Luke see this._

Threepio hadn’t seen Luke for five years before he vanished. He doesn’t know what happened to him, other than what Artoo can tell him, so the details on how he became who he was are beyond sketchy. But the version of him he can remember likely would have approved of this. At least, again, compared to his fears, but maybe, not compared to his hopes. “I think he would have been pleased.”

They spend a moment watching. Rey’s sipping her soup from the wrong side of the spoon, but… Threepio’s not about to swoop in and draw even more attention to that. Plus, she actually thanked the droid who served said soup, and Threepio wants people remembering that more that her spoon etiquette. Plus both Rens appear to be making functional conversation with the people near them, so… It looks like it’s working… Well enough.

_At his school, Luke would say that no one’s ever really gone. And, I couldn’t see them, but I could hear him talking to Yoda or Obi Wan from time to time._

“And you’re thinking that they may be here?”

_Leia at least. She’d come for this._

Threepio nods. “Yes, if she could, she would.”

* * *

Kylo pulls the chair out for Rey, waits for her to sit, and then seats himself. Then everyone else sits.

Rey feels the brush of Ellie’s mind. A bright, _pay attention_ to me sort of though. She takes her napkin, gently slides it out from the ring encircling it, unrolls it, sets her chopsticks on the edge of her plate, and then places it on her lap. Rey sees her do it, and then follows her lead.

Ellie smiles gently, and goes back to talking to the man on her left, J’Freyes Kalmantan, who… she’s remembering… is the Viceroy of the S’Mthalnan system, which… Ship building. He’s a shipbuilding magnate, and they want him happy and pleased with the Order so they can hopefully use his docks, and recruit like crazy around them, eventually setting up their own deep space ship building operations. If he’s not interested in defecting with a collection of his people, he may be willing to be hired as a technical director or the like.

To Rey’s left, a gleaming black droid, vaguely humanoid looking, has a covered try in his arms. Another droid, same basic shape, but it’s steel gray, lifts the cover, and gently lifts, and lowers, by some sort of containment field, a fist sized orb of light green.

As soon as the orb kisses the base of Rey’s bowl, the field retreats, gently settling the soup into her bowl. “Cucumber mint refresher, Mistress,” the black droid says.

Rey smiles at it. Kylo’s showing off with his Force, apparently someone in the kitchen staff is also showing off with their tools. She looks to both droids, nods, to them and says, “Thank you.”

She feels the man to her right, T’Qarnan, Chief Delegate of the Rlyriam system, the second largest system represented here tonight (Amelda Long, of the largest system, is at Kylo’s left.) startle slightly at that.

“You thank droids, my lady?”

“I thank anyone who does me a good turn. It makes it easier to remember that good things are not to be taken for granted.” She looks at her soup, but doesn’t take a bite of it, yet, because not everyone at their table has been served yet. “I have the feeling this is going to be a good thing.”

T’Qarnan, at Rey’s right will be the last one served, nods at her. “It certainly smells so.”

As the droids move around the table, Rey remembers Kylo’s comment about find the highest ranked person in the room, and follow their lead. And yes, that person, technically, may be Kylo, or her, but… She decides that mimicking Lady Kinear means she won’t go wrong, so she watches, and does her best to really _see_ what Ellie’s doing.

She waits for everyone to get their food, and then gently dips her spoon into it, lifting just a little bit to her lips, not putting the spoon in her mouth, and then gently, silently sipping it.

So, Rey does, too.

And maybe she doesn’t have it perfect, but… No one is staring at her like a barbarian barging into the meal and cutting the table into pieces with an ax, so… It’s probably okay.

 _You’re doing fine._ Kylo’s voice in her head.

She almost nods, but doesn’t. No one else at the table knows he did that. Instead she gives his thigh a little squeeze.

 

* * *

Conversation.

It’s a seated dinner, so Rey’s mostly only having to deal with the nine other people at their table. And one of them is Kylo, so that means eight people.

Talk to eight people. No big deal.

Though, apparently they think she’s a big deal. She’s seated on Kylo’s right, which is part of the big deal thing. Most of the people around her noticed the mark on her dress when they went through the receiving line, and that, along with the fact that Mirina Frakes is seated three tables away, is cementing the idea that she’s a _big deal_. Her title… None of them know what that means, but… It’s got to be something right? As soon as this meal ends at least a third of the people here will get to their datapads and start looking up anything they can find on the Maji.

“And where are you from, Mistress Rey? Your accent is… Unique.” T’Qarnan’s wife asks.

“The Rim. At least, I grew up there. Before that, I don’t know.”

“Ah…” Lady T’Qarnan’s not sure what to say about that. The closest she’s ever been to the Rim is reading about it. “And would you not knowing indicate that you are… lacking in family?” she decides to ask.

“It would. My parents died when I was young, too young to ask things like where we were from originally. I’ve been told that at least some of my accent appears to be from the core, so… Maybe they were from somewhere in there, but… I just don’t know.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” T’Qarnan says.

“Thank you. How about you? Have you always lived on Rylriam Prime?”

Actually, that works really well. She gets him talking about Rylriam, and how he became the Chief Delegate, how the two of them met, and what a Chief Delegate and his/her spouse does. That’s a good half hour where all she has to do is nod and ask the occasional question. (And also decide that a system where political leaders are picked by blood sport combat may not make the greatest diplomats, but would likely be good military allies. Apparently, back in the day, T’Qarnan was quite handy with a saber, an actual, metal, _saber._ Which is what drew the attention of the lady to his right, and gets them talking, with a bit of actual interest from Rey, about the difference between a light saber and a metal one.)

Kylo’s foot rubs hers in encouragement as she does it.

 

 

* * *

Amelda Long is on Kylo’s left. He’s surprised she agreed to come to this, but… As the Queen Regent of the Council of Monarchs of the largest system in the galaxy, she’s certainly worthy of her place at his left, and his attention.

He can feel her looking at him like he’s a puzzle to put together, or maybe take apart. And he’s not entirely sure if what he’s about to do next is a good plan, but…

He knows more about her than she knows about him. Namely, he knows that under the Empire, The United Federation of Blytheen Systems was a vassal state, ruled by a military governor, and that her position, though back then it was held by her grandfather, was a figure-head kept in place to maintain a façade of local control and make things easier for the Empire.

He knows, that with the fall of the Empire, her father was able to regain the actual power of his position.

And he knows that back in the day, Princess Leia Organa, who wasn’t even a Senator, yet, had gone to Long’s father, and asked him to send representatives to a New Republic. A Republic designed for mutual protection and support and ease of economic transactions, but one with a significantly less centrist thrust than the Old Republic had had. (Though, of course, by fifteen years in, the old centrist/populist fights had started up again.)

And he knows that Amelda Long, who was about twenty-five at the time, joined the New Republic as a Senator from Blythee Prime, and that she was, if not friendly, then at least aware of what Leia Organa, and her Rebellion, had done for her.

What he’s not entirely sure of is if he wants to have the entire rest of the galaxy know who he used to be. Or where he comes from. Of if he wants to deal with the fallout from that.

He ponders that as he eats a bite of… He’s not sure. The serving droids have told them what everything is, but the name of this current plate, which is a collection of tasty, and brightly-colored oblong shapes, some sort of fruit thing, he thinks, didn’t make it through the attention he was paying to Rey and T’Qarnan talking saber techniques. 

It’ll come out sooner or later. That he’s Leia Organa’s son… That’s a foregone conclusion. If Kinear knows, then others will too, sooner or later. So he can bring it out on his own, or wait for someone to try and use it as a knife against his throat. The way they used Vader against his mother.

He’s fairly sure the link to Amidala is something he can keep hidden, assuming they don’t just flaunt it. Given how few people ever heard that rumor, short of comparing his DNA to those cousins Kinear mentioned, that story will stay dead unless they decide to revive it. That Vader produced a son and daughter is fairly well-known. Vader’s woman is a secret that died with Obi Wan. (Until his grandson and granddaughter-in-law dug it up.) 

He feels Rey gently stroke his leg. _It’s better to control the blade than dodge it._

_I’ve always thought so._

He turns to Long, who is elegantly lifting a bright pink oblong to her lips with her chopsticks. “I was greatly pleased to see you chose to come to this.”

She takes that as her due. “Everyone is talking about you. So, I decided to see what the conversation is about.”

“And do you find me worth the conversation?”

“We’ll certainly have to see.” She’s looking him over, and it’s clear she’s been to a lot of these over the years, and as of this point, she’s not impressed. He also catches the fact that she’s really here because of what he did about the Qualee. Apparently, she’s part of the group who decided to test him with that.

Something must have slipped on his face, because he catches a quick flash of her remembering The Banker calling him a mind reader, a quick glance to a far table, where… The Banker isn’t here, but he sees a woman he thinks is one of the sisters. She notices him follow her gaze, and then her thoughts about that meeting _stop_.

He smiles a little, and it’s not even that fake. “I remember hearing about you when I was younger.” He can feel that intrigues her, a bit. She’s thinking he may have been one of her subjects back in the day. He’s the right species, and his coloring isn’t rare on her home world.

“Good things?”

“Often. You were an ally of my mother’s. Or perhaps she was one of yours.”

“I’ve had many allies over the years.”

He, less elegantly, lifts a bright purple oblong to his lips. He’s better with chopsticks than when he started, but these little things are slippery, and the chopsticks are both round and some sort of basically frictionless black ceramic with white tips. “I’d imagine. And I imagine you remember Leia Organa.”

Long looks mildly surprised, but he can feel the wave of genuine shock behind the gesture. She blinks once. “Ben? I…” She smiles again, genuinely, and then laughs, covering her lips with her fingers. “Oh my… We’ve met before. You were… little. Walking but not talking, yet, and there was some sort of problem with your nanny droid. Your father was away, so Leia brought you to one of our sessions. Tax policy with a toddler. You slept through most of it, and I think the rest of us would have happily changed places with you.”

This time his smile isn’t fake in the slightest. “I often find myself wishing for a nap during tax policy meetings. Apparently, some things don’t change much over thirty years.”

She’s eying him carefully, trying to see Leia or Han in him. “And some do. A new name?”

He half-inclines his head, gently strokes the back of Rey’s hand, and she flashes him a little grin before going back to talking with the people on her right. “Many new things, a name among them.”

Long glances around the table, and then the room, this time really looking, and he knows who she’s seeking. “I notice that neither of your parents are here. Though if memory serves your father was never much for this sort of thing.”

“No. He wasn’t. Though, he might have been willing to make an exception for something like this.” He has the sense that for a night, for his _son’s_ night, Han’d put up with the stuffed shirts, and possibly have even behaved himself. Maybe. “So, perhaps their spirits are here, but their bodies are no longer capable of making an appearance.”

“Oh. My condolences.”

“Thank you.” She’s being so polite, but he can feel her mind whirling through trying to figure out how Ben Solo ended up on the First Order side of the war. 

He not only wants to distract from that, he also wants to focus in on the reason why she’s here. “My understanding is that you were willing to support the New Republic as long as it remained firmly in the anti-centrist camp.” Left unspoken is that as soon as they started trying to consolidate into a centrist organization Long and her representatives all left.

“Yes. One-size-fits-all governments fit no one.”

“I agree. I find the idea of attempting to force people to join and serve you to be unsavory.”

“That’s… reassuring.” He gets a quick mental flash of a meeting, and knows that she’ll be reporting back to several people about this, soon.

“I’d hope so.”

She’s quiet for a moment as she lifts a neon green oblong to her lips, looking at Kylo, thinking. Once she’s swallowed she says, “How do you feel about… release valves?”

This time, he knows the surface topic, and the under topic, and is having no problem following along. “Vitally important for the health and survival of any functional system. Too much pressure builds up, and things explode. And no one’s better off in that situation.”

She nods slowly, and he can feel her thinking that his recruiting stations might make an awfully useful release valve for her own system. A way for people who are dissatisfied, trouble makers, or just looking for something different to get it. A way to do it with minimal cost to herself. She’s more than secure in the sense that he’ll never resettle enough Citizens of the Order into her society, at least not in her lifetime, to cause trouble, so she might as well use him as a way to give her dissatisfied citizens a way out.

And Kylo’s more than content to take them.

 

 

* * *

It’s a show all right. Jon appears to have chosen the _Finalizer_ for this because its observation deck allows for 330 degrees of uninterrupted view.

Kylo doesn’t even want to contemplate how annoyed Mitaka has to be at having his observation deck stolen for a formal dinner, but… Actually… Right… He’s over there, five tables to the left, with… what appears to be a date, or maybe he’s married, talking to… Grand Admiral Schiff, apparently having a good time.

Or, Jon… or Threepio… is good enough at this to have figured out that if you’re going to ruffle some feathers, offering the ruffled a chance to show off how good he is at his job to a few of the higher ups is a decent way to smooth those feathers back down.

From here, they can see the _Supremacy_ looming, taking up most of the space around them as hundreds of smaller ships zip through their training paces.

The people around him are watching. Watching the show. Watching each other. And many of them are thinking. Like Long, some of them are considering the value of release valves. Some of them are thinking of business deals and political assignations they’d rather not host on their own soil. Some of them are counting ships and guns, wondering how much more fight Kylo can bring to a fight.

Kylo’s glancing around, looking for Jon, but he doesn’t see him. He’s not at his place, which means he’s dealing with something with the party, or he’s off enjoying one of those blind corners, and Kylo decides that whatever he may be doing, now isn’t the time to interrupt with a mental congratulations on very good work.

Rey catches his thoughts as he’s scanning the room. She glances around, also noting the lack of Jon. _Hoping to do some of that, too?_

He knows she’s teasing him. He knows it’s intentional. He would love nothing better than to excuse himself, find a corner, and drag her into it, but… He’s got the sinking suspicion that Jon’s actually _right_ about how he’s the only person in this damn room who can’t vanish for longer than it takes to get to the restroom, pee, and come back.

 _I_ really _wish. I’ve been told in very definite terms that I can’t leave with you and find our own corner to hide in._

_Why pick a corner? Not like it’d take any time to get back to our room._

_I’ve been told the chance of getting walked in on is part of the fun._

_And Jon would know._

_Apparently, Jon would know._ He can see her looking around, but Jon’s still not within either of their lines of sight.

Rey thinks about that, her hand gently stroking over his thigh. His hand closes on hers, not exactly making her stop, but making her aware of how it feels to him. The pleasure of her touch, how distracting it is, how much he really wishes he could drag them off to a blind corner, balanced with the awareness that he probably does need to be paying attention to the people around him.

 _Maybe if we ever do this with a few hundred fewer people,_ she thinks at him.

He licks his lips, rolling them together, doing his best not to smile. He does blast her with an image of them in their own corner, him kissing her shoulder, his hands under her bottom, her leg over his hip, her hands in his hair, as he grinds against her.

_Tease._

_You love it._

She smiles at the man next to her, still blathering on, but Kylo knows that smile’s for him. _You know I do._

 

 

* * *

They’re on course number… Rey doesn’t actually know. The Droids come by, she takes a few bites, listens, talks some, they come by again, taking whatever it is away, refilling drinks, and then are back a few moments later with even more food.

All of it has been tasty, but… It’s just a lot.

This one is some sort of little dumpling. The sauce with them is especially good, and she’s trying to not wolf them down, because Ellie’s more or less screaming in her head about eating slowly, gently, each bite one at a time, with chewing and talking in between… But if she does that, this plate is going to go away before she finishes it.

So, of course, as she’s trying to get as much of this into her mouth instead of on her plate, she gets asked a question she’s actually got to answer, one that she can’t fob off in a few words, or reflect to the rest of the guests.

By Ellie.

Rey looks up at her, thinks _Traitor_ and then sighs.

Ellie sniggers, at least, in her head, thinks at her: _Just ask for it again tomorrow. The kitchens will make you whatever you like, Lady Amidala_.

Everyone else at the table is looking at her, likely because they’ve all got the same question in mind. What does the Mistress of the Maji _do?_

Rey puts her chopsticks down. No eating while she talks. “A lot of things, and most of them aren’t terribly glamorous.”

Kylo pets her hip under the table, blasting her with a warm, happy feeling.

“I guess, first and foremost, I study. I read a lot, and ask questions, and listen to answers, and think about them.”

“And what are you studying, Lady Rey?” Amelda Long asks, and Rey can tell she’s got an idea what the answer is.

“The Force, faith, churches, philosophy, how to build a farm, how to fix insulating fields, how to make cookies… A lot of things.”

“That’s a diverse collection of interests,” Kinear says.

“It is, but… You can’t live just in ancient books and obscure thought processes. The weather gets cold, and you need to stay warm, which means you need those insulating fields to work. And once they do, you can curl up with a book written by a monk a thousand years ago, talking about the nature kindness.”

Kylo smiles at her. “Maybe with a cookie and a cup of milk.”

She flashes him a little smile, too. “Maybe.”

“You mentioned the Force, is the Maji a sort of Jedi?” Lady T’Qarnan asks.

“Only in the sense that the Jedi also worshiped the Force. It’s a Church of the Force that explicitly rejects Light/Dark dualism, which, of course, was the driving theological thrust of the Jedi.”

“You’re not trying to resurrect the Jedi?” Ellie asks.

“No. As of this point, Luke Skywalker was the last Jedi. I suppose one of my students may decide to follow that path, but I don’t intend to.”

“You have students?” Curran Long, Amelda’s consort, asks.

“Yes. Mistress is a literal title. There aren’t a lot of us, but over time we’ll grow.” She taps the spiral at her throat. “I hope you’ll see more of them, spreading across the galaxy.”

“Why a spiral?” T’Qarnan asks.

“The Jedi held that the light was good and holy. The dark evil and corrupting. The Maji believes that everyone is, in all times and all ways, both. We seek to balance those energies and turn them toward, well, hopefully something good. The light and the dark spin into each other, forming gray.”

“The dark isn’t just another term for evil?” Ellie asks.

“Only if you ask a Jedi, and one who’s giving you a very short form of the answer. The dark is attached. It’s passionate love, or the kind of anger you can only feel by being very deeply invested in something. It’s strong, deep emotions, and the sort of vivid actions that go with them. It’s wanting and needing. The Jedi, rightly, noticed that those sorts of feelings can easily lead people to do ‘bad’ things. If you’ve ever done something stupid or hurtful because you were scared, you know what I’m talking about.”

Everyone at the table nods, they’ve all been there.

“The Jedi felt that the best way to not do hurtful, stupid things was to never get attached to anything other than being a good Jedi. They worshiped the Light, which is calmness, serenity, knowledge. All of which is lovely, but without any motivating passion, it’s… well, sort of useless.” Rey takes a sip of her drink. “If you’ve got nothing to aim your light at, no attachments, no… better world, or loves, or… meaning… All you’re doing is making your mind a pristine chapel, but… your outside world isn’t any better off. And really, if you’re letting everything and one around you rot while you tend to your own mind, you’re not making yourself any better, either.”

“And if you’re constantly telling people that their entirely normal, deeply human, wired since the dawn of evolution wants and needs are somehow bad or perverted, and that the nature of the universe disapproves of them, and you for having them, you’re not doing those people any favors, either,” Kylo says, voice dark.

Both Rey and Kylo feel Kinear think very hard _TOO PERSONAL._

Rey gives Kylo’s hand a little squeeze under the table. “Anyway. I’m not a Jedi. I’m not training Jedi. I’ve got no interest in it. I am trying to find a way to live in this universe, balance our wants and needs with a responsibility to make things some sort of concrete better, while not pushing people into molds they’re not fit for.”

Ellie smiles at that. “Sounds a lot like trying to be a good parent.”

“It certainly might. My students are mostly orphans, and I am, too… So, we’re all a little thin on the ground when it comes to examples of good parenting, but we’re trying to figure it out. How many children do you have, Lady Kinear?”

And that gets the conversation to children, and trying to raise them, which, with the exception of Kylo and Rey, everyone at the table has hands on experience with and opinions about.   

 

 

* * *

Dessert is that pale, jiggle-y custard that they’d had before. Last time it was almond flavored and rose water scented. The almond flavoring is still there, but it’s got a deep, dark coffee syrup drizzled over it. Kylo still thinks the texture is a bit off, at least as something to eat, (he’s been carefully using his spoon to skim the coffee syrup off of it, and just eat that) but he’s pleased to see that Rey loves it and is snarfing it on down in record time, appalled looks by Lady Kinear be damned.

His own is more or less just sitting on its plate, wiggling a little when he scrapes more of the syrup off of it.

“No taste for pana cotta?” Long asks, seeing him occasionally poke his dessert.

He puts his spoon down. “I’m more of a chocolate fan.”

“There is something to be said for good chocolate. Dark?”

“Darker the better.”

She’s eyeing his outfit, the black ship they’re hovering around, and Kylo’s reputation as she nods, slowly. “Still, occasionally something light and sweet is good.”

Kylo smiles at her, nods, and gently lays his hand on Rey’s shoulder. “I agree.”

Rey glances over at him, sees his dessert just sitting there, and her own plate very empty, and raises and eyebrow. He nods, and she swaps their plates, and okay, maybe that’s not the best manners ever, but no pana cotta was wasted, and a few of the other people at the table thought it was cute.

 

 

* * *

There are certain things Kylo’s _really_ wanted to do since he first laid eyes on Rey, all dressed up, hours ago. Peel that dress off of her. Or maybe leave it on. Find out what’s under it. (Which seems to hint that peeling it off would win.) Kiss every inch of her body. (Again, seems like that dress isn’t going to stay on, but he does have a few really vivid images of her on him, wearing it.) Slowly pulling his hands through her hair, feeling it curling and wild under his fingers once it’s released from the pins. Her in just the necklace, riding him. (He wants to know if it’ll bounce when she does. The Maji token does, and he’s been known to appreciate that on occasion.) Her on her knees in front of him. (That’s one of the really vivid images with the dress. It’s just possible that Jon knew what he was talking about with the whole formal wear thing, and one of these days Kylo’s _going_ to find out.)

But, by the time they’re getting back to the _Supremacy,_ when there’s still two fucking hour of this thing left, he’s just _tired._ How sitting on his ass, talking and eating can possibly take this much energy he doesn’t know, but…

He can sense she’s tired, too. By their standards it’s about two hours past normal bedtime, which is likely also part of being tired, but he’s had enough coffee that he’s not so much sleepy as just… tired.

The _Finalizer_ docks on the main flight deck of the _Supremacy_ and this is Jon’s crowning moment of the show. There’s room on the flight deck for a Super Star Destroyer, so any other space navy will have no problems finding a berth here.

It’s also a very elegant statement that, should the _Supremacy_ show up next to your fleet, you’ve got _no idea_ what might come out of it.

 

 

* * *

Fortunately, they don’t have to say goodnight to everyone. Three more fucking hours of saying goodnight to everyone would drive him fully around the bend, and Rey would likely just teleport back to Lirium and never talk to him again.

She gives him a little mental kick at that thought. _I’d teleport both of us back to Lirium, and maybe we’d have a serious talk about you becoming a full time Maji._

He’s glancing around, at the press of people milling around through their main flight deck, many of them getting on trams to take them to their rooms. _Tempting._

One of the guests comes over to him, he doesn’t remember his name, but the… again, Kylo’s not sure what this person is, so he’s just going to call him a person and leave it at that. His common tongue is very good, though, which, given the shape of his mouth (Kylo thinks it’s a mouth) and the number of teeth (he hopes those things are teeth) that’s quite a feat. “This has been a lovely party, Master Ren.”

“Thank you. I’m glad to see you were willing to attend.” _Do you have any idea who this is?_

_Nope._

Threepio sweeps over, “Master Ren, this is His Royal Highness, First of his Name, Holy Sequetra of the Q’Rlings…” _Good lord, no wonder I didn’t remember this._ Rey does _not_ snigger at that. “Gul’Horan of the” the series of whispers and clicks that follow strike Kylo as the kind of sounds he expects to come out of a mouth that narrow with that many teeth. “He had spoken with us about arranging for a bit of our floor space to hold a treaty signing.”

Kylo smiles. “Excellent.”

“I was wondering Master Ren, if, in addition to providing neutral territory, and a safe place to store goods in escrow to go with said treaties, if you’ve given any thought to enforcing contracts made in your venue?”

Kylo blinks. “I’ll admit, I haven’t, but I certainly could start thinking in that direction.”

Gul’Horan nods. “Continue thinking, and have your people contact mine when you come to a conclusion. Many players in this galaxy would benefit from _ironclad_ contracts that can be assessed and enforced by a _neutral_ party.”

Kylo nods at that, too. “Yes, I imagine that’s true.”

Rey squeezes his hand. She can feel the way he’s feeling that, too. A sense of stepping into a void he was _made_ to fill. And that this one minute here was worth all of the annoyance of the last few hours.

“Thank you…” Shit, he’s got no idea what the fuck he’s supposed to call this person to his face, so his thank you sort of trails off lamely. “You’ve given me something valuable to think about, and I appreciate it.”

“Your thanks is most welcome.” Gul’Horlan looks off to the side. “My mate is calling. I believe it is time to retire for the evening.”

“I wish you a pleasant rest.”

Gul’Horlan can’t exactly nod, he doesn’t appear to have a neck. He does bow slightly, and Kylo bows back, hoping that’s good.

Threepio doesn’t groan. He doesn’t say anything. He leaves as soon as Gul’Horlan does.

Kylo looks to Rey. _Do you think that’s things thawing between us?_

_It could be._

He feels the trepidation in her thought. _By which you mean, no._

_By which I mean, I think he did that out of duty to your mom._

_Well, it got me a good idea, so I’ll take it._

 

 

* * *

There’s another hour and a half of that. Longer, informal, and mostly just feeling each other out, but possibly starting hints of good things conversations.

But, eventually, the guests have all been taken off to their rooms, and Kylo and Rey are standing with each other, Jon, the Kinears, and the Schiffs.

“Not bad, not bad at all,” Schiff says.

Kinear offers them a tired grin. “It’s been a grand night, and I’m knackered,” he shoots off a fast, and sardonic salute. “The speech is fifteen hours from now, and I suggest all of us spend at least ten of the hours between now and then asleep.”

Rey yawns, and Jon does, too.

He grins, a little sheepishly. “That sounds like an excellent idea. Tomorrow…” he glances to the chronometer, “Later today really,” and then heads off toward the trams. The Kinears and Schiffs follow.

Rey looks to Kylo. _You want to follow?_

 _Fuck no!_ He takes her hand, and a second later, they’re in their bed at Lirium. Laying down feels  _sooo good!_   “I’m moving exactly eight more steps today.”

She smirks a bit at that. “Eight.”

“Four to the bathroom, and four back to our bed.”

That gets a tired laugh out of her.

Her eyes close and the feel of the bed under her is lulling. Without opening them, she says, “How bad do you think it is to sleep in this?”

 

 

He shrugs, slowly pushing himself up, and giving her a hand up, too. “If I were less tired, I’d be extremely interested in helping you out of it, but, now, I just want to pee and sleep.”

She laughs at that, too. “I thought this sort of thing was supposed to be glamourous.” Four steps, done. Brush teeth, pee, maybe, if she’s feeling really frisky, wipe the makeup off and pull the pins out of her hair, left to go. “Feeling energetic enough to help me get my hair out of this?” she asks as she puts toothpowder on her brush.

He nods, slowly, leaning against the wall in their bathroom, taking care of business. “Yeah, probably.” A moment later he’s washing his hands, and then getting his toothbrush ready.

Together, they get the pins out, and she does wipe the makeup off her face. Kylo kicks off his shoes, and undresses. He’s even able to give her a hand with the dress, though both of them look at the bra and just give up.

“When we wake up,” he says with a very tired smile.

She nods, yawning. “In the morning.”

 

 

* * *

In a matter of hours the birth name and family of Kylo Ren is out. An hour after that, the rumor begins. General Organa knew she couldn’t take the First Order militarily. So she sent her son into it, and he turned it inside out. After all, the people who are paying attention, really paying attention, have noticed a few similarities between what Master Ren is proposing to do, and what Senator Organa tried to do.

It’ll be a few days before that one gets to him, and Kylo decides not to touch it. He won’t confirm or deny it, feeling that in some circles that’s better than the truth, and in others, it’s not. When asked about it, days later, he’ll say, “From a certain point of view, all stories are true.”

 

* * *

A day later someone will call him Master Solo. Kylo freezes him. Not in the sense of making it so he can’t move, but he floods his body with a sick, bone-chilling cold, and quietly says, “Master Solo was my father. Kylo Ren. Master Ren. Lord Ren. My Lord, Sir, Master, I answer to all of those, but not Solo.”

“Yes, Master Ren.”

And Kylo will nod.   

 

* * *

There are whispers of a new player coming into his own. Power is, of course, ephemeral and eternal, but it is also local and geographic, and if the Master intends to rise the Court of Ren, as a _moving_ place to make deals, to settle scores, and seek accord, or, at least, quell hostilities, then the name of the game is going to shift, soon.

The man who claims the mantle of Order, and then sets a place for others to come to terms, by offering a place, and rules to abide by, is a man who can shake the current system.

The man who can bring systems into his orbit, by force or by faith or by fealty, is the man who can claim the title of Emperor.

But if he can do it by faith or fealty… And those are the plays Master Ren appears to be attempting to make…

If it works…

If it works, that’s a man who can change the galaxy.

There are many whispers about that. No one knows _if_ he can do it, but they’re certainly eager to speculate.

 

 

* * *

But those stories will pale in comparison to the biggest story of the Order’s First Year Celebration.

The Master has a Lady.

Since the rise of Kylo Ren, there have been rumors about him. But by the time the galaxy first meets Mistress Rey of the Maji, the mysteries of Kylo Ren were almost ten years old, and long hashed over, and given what was leaking out across the galaxy, suddenly becoming somewhat less mysterious.

Before the dinner is over, the rumors of Mistress Rey, (Mistress Ren? Given the easy way they had with each other, more than a few voices are speculating that the Master and his Lady are already married.) have begun. Her name is... They don’t know. It’s so common it could be from anywhere. Her accent, mostly Core, with a flavor of the unknown regions. She has somewhat Alderaanian table manners. (Though that’s difficult to tell using chopsticks.) There’s a rumor going around that her parents died when she was young, and that she’d ended up on the Rim, in hiding. With the Ben Solo rumor galloping through the galaxy, the idea that perhaps his bride (wife?) is the last member of one of the lost houses of Alderaan doesn’t seem impossible, though she does look a bit young for it.

The mark she wore upon her neck belongs to something called a Maji, and that’s also getting a huge amount of gossip, because no one can find out what it is, and what she had to say about it was generally uninformative. It’s a religious organization. It’s dedicated to seeking balance in the universe through the Force. It appears to be a Church of the Force, but not _the_ Church of the Force. They know the Master is a… Jedi… Sith… Whatever Snoke was… Maybe? Actually, they don’t know what Master Ren is. As the name Ben Solo begins to flame through the galaxy, there are whispers starting that The Master is a Jedi. So… perhaps the Maji are a sort of Jedi, too? Perhaps Mistress Rey is a Jedi? They’ve seen the Master use the Force, but as of yet, they don’t know about Mistress Rey… But they’re happy to speculate.

And above and beyond all of that, is the word spreading like wildfire that the Master of the Order appears to be utterly, head over heels, in love with her, and she with him, and if the undercurrent of stories about Mirina Frakes attending are true, the galaxy is on it’s way to seeing the grandest wedding in likely a century.

After all, it’s been too damn long since the galaxy saw something bright with spectacle, and had a true, honest to Force, _romance_ to play with.

And people, the _right_ people, are eager.

 


	64. The First Day

1/1/2

 

She should be asleep.

Everything in Rey’s body is screaming at her to roll back over, scoot in closer to Kylo, snuggle up to the warm, gently shifting lump of him under their nice, soft blankets, and go the fuck back to sleep.

It should be easy; she’s warm, and soft, and sleepy, and quiet, and safe, and nothing to do for hours, and…

Her brain, on the other hand, is, for no reason she can ascertain, AWAKE!

Really awake.

Disconcertingly awake.

It’s been… she glances at the chronometer… seven hours since they got home. Her body is tired. Her muscles are sore, and that’s mind-boggling because it’s not like she was doing anything _hard._ Other than, apparently, just standing or sitting around for hours on end, socializing, is hard.

Kylo is not awake. He’s crashed out next to her, still smelling, very faintly, of last night’s coffee and cologne. His eyes are flickering a bit behind their lids, and he’s dreaming. So, he’s very much not awake, at all.

He still curls around her, angling a bit so his mouth is on her shoulder, and she can feel the soft, easy brush of his breath on her skin.

She shifts a bit, carefully, feeling… right… That’s why she’s awake. Yes, she is tired and sore from too much standing around. Yes, there’s a dull all-over sense of too much. And yes, all of that is annoying enough to have blurred the edge of the thing that’s actually causing the problem. Namely, the bra she doesn’t know how to get out of is poking her in the hip and armpits and it’s _really_ starting to hurt.

The closures are in the back. She knows Tasha spent… it felt like a long time, hooking them up and into place. There’s a bow in the front, and ribbons lacing up, so… she unknots the bow, and gives everything a tug, and that at least lets her breathe a little easier, but it’s still made to keep her posture nice and straight, so it’s still poking her in the armpit and hip. 

She sighs, shifts around some, tries to fall back to sleep, but it’s there, nagging at her, annoying her.

_Fuck it._ She figures that if she rolls onto her stomach, she’ll be able to get access to her back, and then somehow, she’ll just… Use the Force or something, to make the damn thing come off, and that’ll be that.

Step One: Roll Over, works perfectly.

Step Two: Do literally anything else is a massive fail because as soon as she’s on her belly, Kylo follows her, snuggling in deep, arm thrown over her shoulders, leg across her hip and thigh, pinning her to the bed.

Unless she’s going to wake him up, she’s going nowhere.

She’s thinking about it. Debating it. On her belly, she’s stretched out, so it’s not poking her as much. She could… maybe… She slows her breath down, and tries to focus on sleepy thoughts and feelings but as she’s doing that, she notices that the weight of Kylo’s arm is a bit less on her shoulders, and his lips, which had been just sitting against her shoulder, are definitely kissing, in an utterly unfocused, and potentially still asleep sort of way.

_You awake?_

_No._ Kiss, kiss, lick, kiss. That arm that lifted up for a moment just resettled itself on her butt, fingers curled around her hip, pulling her onto her side and snugging her butt right against his pelvis.

And she can feel exactly why he’s done that. He’s hot and hard behind her, and being rocked gently against her rear. _Part of you is._

_That part doesn’t need to sleep._ He’s nuzzling the back of her neck, and his hand has wandered to cup her maomao, very gently, very relaxed, barely rocking the heel of his palm against her jewel.

He’s breathing soft and easy, and she can feel the tired clinging to him, feel it behind her eyelids, too, and apparently enough of her annoyance at the bra is leaking through, because she feels his hands move, and then there’s a sound, a… she doesn’t know what that sound is, but she’s got the feeling that her bra is not suppose to make that sound, but right now she doesn’t care because he just gave it a hard pull, and she’s free, and it’s thwaping against the wall to fall to the floor.

“Thank you.”

“Nmnr.”

He’s still behind her, so she can’t see him, but she’s fairly sure he didn’t actually open his mouth to respond to that.

She settles back into him, feeling his lips on her shoulder and neck, and his body wrapped around hers. Comfortable again, feeling warm from his skin, and warm from his touch, her mind starts to wander a bit.

_Dreaming._ She half thinks, half dreams at him.

_Mmmm…_

Images start to dance behind her eyelids. Them, the night before, instead of standing in line forever, they’ve snuck off. The party is still on, a rumble of voices and intents behind them, but they’re off, hidden from direct view, for a moment, as long as no one rounds the corner, or peeks behind the curtains.

_Your dream?_

His hand shifts a bit in response to that, one of his fingers slipping between her lips, seeking out her pearl. He’s not moving much, any friction she’s getting is coming from the slow roll of her own hips, but he’s giving her something to rub against.

And lighting up her mind with the dream.

They don’t have long. They’ve been looking at each other all night, playing with words and thoughts, but people keep watching. Expecting them to talk or listen. Finally, finally they’ve got a minute, or three, maybe five, but not longer than that.

And maybe less, if anyone turns that corner… The Master and his Lady, in public, _together._ The gossip would be scandalous.

He’s behind her, kissing her shoulder and neck, hands on her breasts, trailing down, to her hips, pulling her skirts up. 

She’s reaching behind her, finding the zip on his trousers, feeling him hot and proud behind her, eager as she undoes the zipper and pulls him out.

His hands move fast, pulling up layer after layer of her skirt, each layer of fine silk trying to slow them down by attempting to slither out of his grasp. Finally he’s got them all up, wrapped around his fist, pinned to her belly.

The air of the _Supremacy_ is cool on her bottom, and his shaft is hot, and a little shift, an arc of her hips, real and fantasy, and he’s slipping into her. In the dream, she stifles her groan by pulling his face to hers for a deep kiss.

In bed, they’re mostly asleep, and whatever noises they make are muffled by sleep-slack lips. 

In the dream, they have to go fast, anyone could walk over, anyone could see. She’s facing the wall, and he’s right behind her, hunched against her back, so they wouldn’t see _much,_ but anyone old enough to go to the party is old enough to recognize what they’re up to. No one moves like that unless they’re fucking.

In bed… Maybe they’re moving, maybe not. The dream’s doing most of the work, now.

In the dream… They’ve got to be quiet. The corner is blind, not silent. The party is whirling away on the other side of the curtain. And it’s so difficult. He’s slipping against her sweet and deep, and she’s rocking her hips back, more friction, faster, deeper, lighting them both up. His hand on her belly keeps her pinned to him, keeps her hips at the right angle, so his body is just sweet, sweet, sweet pressure against hers and he drops that hand a bit lower, uncaring if her wet skin might leave a mark on the hem of her dress, or more likely, caring, because he _likes_ the idea of it, knowing it’s there, able to see it the rest of the night. He presses the palm of his hand, through the silks, against her delta, giving her more to rub against.

And she’s rubbing, almost there, chasing her pleasure and his. She pulls his free hand to her mouth, sucks his index and middle finger keep from making noise, and that jerks the speed of his hips up, makes him hotter, harder.

 

 

She sucks again, arching back against him, and he’s cursing in her mind, a litany of _Fuck Rey! FUCK! Gods, love! FUCK!_

His face is tight, hips and thighs, tight, body holding onto the edge with his fingernails, trying not to fall over until she does, but he’s so close, and any little thing could put him over right now.

She rides him, rides of the feel of it through him, the hot, hard, heavy aching/yearn/need of his shaft in her, and her back arches as she’s grinding against his hand. So… so… close. Just… She can feel the tingles about to start, and they both stiffen, hearing footsteps and voices, and they’ve got to be quiet, got to be still, they’re going to get caught, but it feels so damn good, and they can’t stop, not for anything, it’s just _too good_.

She’s breathing hard, heart galloping, and he’s dropped her skirt, not caring if it gets dirty, hand fully under it, fingers on her pearl, steady, focused, fast, circling just the way she likes it.

He shifts his hand from her face to the wall, more stability, leaning into it, pushing further into her, moving faster.

She’s half-turned, biting his arm, because her lips alone can’t keep her moans muffled, and his head is buried in her hair, lips against her neck, as he’s thrashing against, her, so deep and so fast, and just… almost…

Not…

Quite…

They’re hanging there, moving fast and frantic in the dream, stuck, footsteps getting closer, bodies aching, almost able to taste the spurt that’s coming but not able to reach it.

It’s dream sex, and it feels amazing, both of them are more turned on, closer to spurting without spurting than they’ve ever been. Their brains are eager and active and _wanting._ But their bodies aren’t moving, so Rey can’t quite get over the line, and Kylo’s just about killing himself to stay on the right side of it, because he knows he can topple like this, but he doesn’t want to, not until she’s quivering on him.

Finally, he pulls his real body awake enough to make his actual fingers move, just enough to give her some actual friction, and in a heartbeat she’s quivering and shuddering against him. Her body, her real body rippling over his which is _more_ than he needed. Dream him can feel the vibration of her voice through his sleeve, and her body clenching against his as he snaps his hips burying his shaft deep, deep into her. And he’s gone, twitching, spurting from his toes to his eyelashes and everywhere in between, shouting against her shoulder, and both of them are _very content._

And very, deeply, asleep.

 

 

* * *

Three hours later, they wake up again, significantly less tired, and stickier.

Shower. Breakfast. Not much to do right now. They knew it’d be a late night, so Rey didn’t schedule anything for the morning, and Kylo’s got nothing until the First Year Speech, and after that, more parties, though these are significantly less formal. The D, E, and F decks will all be open to the celebration, and everyone who’s off-duty is invited to join in.

So, that’s what they’ll do. Go to each deck, walk around, share the party, talk to people, be _approachable_.

But that’s later, now, they’re just milling around. Resting. He’s reading and re-reading his speech, practicing it in their bed. She’s tidying up, and sees what Kylo did to her bra. It’s not ripped, but the hooks and eyes that closed the back are bent out of shape.

He looks mildly chagrined about that, but mostly because he didn’t really get to see her in it.

Looking at it he asks, “Do you have another major getting ready session?”

“No. A minor one. Hair and ‘subtle’ makeup. I’m not sure what that is. Clothing I can put on myself. Tasha says the whole thing should take about half an hour. You?”

He rolls his eyes. “I have permission to get ready in my own rooms, today.” He thinks about that, too. “Did you have fun with Rose, yesterday?”

She shrugs, and flops onto the bed next to him. “Maybe. Some parts were… I don’t know… Odd. ‘How’d you two meet?’ He kidnapped me. Cue the wincing. ‘Where are you from?’ Jakku. ‘Don’t say that! They’ll think you had him blow it up.”

“More wincing?” Kylo asks.

“More wincing. Watching Mirina order Rose and Finn to start attending these things and watching our backs was interesting.”

Kylo thinks about it for a moment. “Would they?”

“I don’t know. Rose and I are going to talk more. She, on her own, might. With Finn…”

“No.” His voice is flat as he says it.

“Yeah. Poe maybe.”

Kylo sniggers a little at that. “There’s an image.” Though as he thinks about it, he’s realizing that Poe likely would be good at something like that. A few more years of growing up time, and Jacen likely would, too. Actually… a few more years, and Jacen would likely make an immensely talented spy.

“Planning ahead?” Rey can feel his mind spinning.

“Maybe. We’ll have to see if something like that interest him.”

“Something like…” She draws out the particulars of what he’s thinking.

“Give him to Jon, stick an Ensign’s uniform on him. He’d look the right general age, and no one pays much attention to people with that low of a rank. He could just go, listen, and… occasionally suggest to people to just keep talking about whatever it is.”

She touches the pendent on her chest. “The Order of the Maji. Is that what I’m doing here, training the Maji Knights?”

Kylo shrugs. “If they want to be? The Jedi didn’t have a choice about serving the Republic. The Maji… They can join the Order or not as they see fit.”

She rolls onto her belly, looking at him. “The Order _and_ The Maji?”

He puts the datapad to the side, and pulls her to him. “Realistically, yes. But as long as it’s you and me in charge, it’s The Order _of_ The Maji. Maybe one day I’ll hand this over to someone else, and it’ll be The Order again, or maybe another Maji will replace me and keep it up. And one day you’ll pass this on, and maybe that person won’t have much use for whomever’s in charge of the Order, and they’ll split, but as long as it’s us…”

She nods to that. Then sighs a bit. “You’re not going to make them join us, will you?”

He scoffs. “No. But I have a feeling some will. He taps his own Maji token. As soon as I start wearing this openly, others will follow. Last night… You could see it, some of them are interested. Some of them may be interested in the philosophy. Some’ll join for favor.” He looks around at their cottage, and the bits of the Lirium he can glimpse through the one way window glass. “I don’t want them coming here. Jon, or the Kinears maybe. I’ll port them over, so they can’t get there on their own, but…”

They can both imagine Lirium flooded with favor seekers and hangers on. Neither of them likes it.

“You think, instead of scouring the galaxy looking for people to recruit, I may be able to convince Poe to spend at least a few days a week on the _Supremacy,_ and doing it there?” Kylo asks.

“You can ask. We’ve still got the same problem we had before. I can take maybe two more kids before I just can’t take more of them, so… If he wants to do some sort of outreach for adults, or… Something like that… I’d be fine with it. Start… I don’t know, the Second Church of the Maji, on the _Supremacy_ or something like that. I could see that.”

Kylo can sort of see that, too. “I told Jon, that after today was done, and likely after tomorrow and the day after, too, we’d sit down. You and I, him, Poe, the Kinears, Threepio, the Ticos if they’d consent to attend, Schiff and his wife maybe… Did you feel like she was part of his team, or more a hanger on?”

“I didn’t pay much attention to her.”

“I didn’t either. And if she managed to spend eight hours next to us without either of us really noticing her, that means we should probably be paying attention to her.”

Rey sighs. “Probably. So, you want all of us to get together…”

“Yeah, and start talking about what the Order of the Maji is, where we’re going, why. An image of the balance, of how we’re getting there, not just from my mind or yours.”

He can feel her not say it. “Go ahead.”

“If your Mom would sit in…”

That gets a sigh, too. “I’m wary of taking the advice of the person who lost the war.”

“You’re wary of seeing her again, and you know it.”

He rolls his eyes at that. She’s not wrong. She’s the one who spent hours holding him after the last time they saw each other, so she’s _especially_ not wrong in this case.

But he isn’t, either. Leia was dark. She could see the problems. She could destroy. She could lend her fire and anger to tearing down injustice, and she was _good_ at it. But he feels like he’s got all the dark they could possibly need for this project. He’s not sure there’s anything she can bring to the table that he can’t.

He looks at himself, in bed, lying next to Rey, and can feel it. Feel his mother, her dark, and the light she was supposed to be building with.

She could imagine a better world, but her light… Her light wasn’t strong enough to build it. Because her partner in the light ran away to build a school for Jedi, instead of joining her and securing the political platform they needed to thrive on. And, while he may be swayable on Leia joining the party, he’d much prefer Luke wasn’t around.

Rey follows that thought. “Maybe.” And again, she looks out to the settlement around them. “Would you call this running away?”

“I don’t want to. This is… important. I can feel that. It needs to happen, but…” He bites his lip. “My stuff needs to happen, too. All of this. It’s supposed to go together. You and I, together. I can’t do this without you, and I don’t think you can do this without me. You feel it, right?”

She kisses him. “I feel it.”  

His hand trails down her side. “That’s probably why we’re lovers and not siblings. It’s keeping us attached to each other in a way we just wouldn’t be if we were siblings. They didn’t see each other for years at a time, and I don’t think I can go more than a few days without seeing you.

She kisses him again. “Lucky for you, I’m not going anywhere.” She glances at the chronometer. “Except the _Supremacy,_ because we’re getting close to time to get ready again.”     

 

 

* * *

Getting ready with each other is nice. Granted, he thinks the hair/cosmetics droids look silly. They’re hovering over Rey doing something to her hair and face. He certainly doesn’t mind the results, though.  

Rey rolls her eyes at that. “Do men do this?”

He sighs, eyeing it, and then glancing in the mirror next to their bed. It’s abundantly clear he’s tired. “If you so much as breathe a hint of that to Jon, he’ll have me sitting in front of one of those things every damn day.”

“If I have to do it…”

He eyes it, wondering… “Do you think it’s got something like the color of my skin?” It’s got her skin tone matched perfect, and something on her cheeks and lips, and right now, she looks like all she’s been doing is lazing around in warm sunshine after a lot of happy fucking. She’s rested and glowing, and… yes, he doesn’t mind seeing this on her, at all.

“Wait, you might…” She’d been teasing him, not expecting him to actually _do_ something about it.

“You look better without the black circles under your eyes from staying up late last night. I probably would, too, and they’re going to broadcast this, and then we’ve got more parties, so… It’s probably useful to _not_ look tired…” He’s talking himself into it. “So… It doesn’t hurt, right?” It’s doing something to her eyelashes, and he’s not sure about that. Very not sure that he can stay still with something that close to his eyeball, touching him.

She’s being very still, probably because of whatever it’s doing to her lashes. Making them darker and longer, apparently. “It doesn’t hurt. And I think it’s supposed to be able to color match your skin.”

Kylo glances in the mirror again, and he thinks about how many cameras are going to be on him in less than an hour. “So, sure, I’ll give it a shot. There’s time to wash it off if it’s awful.”

 

 

* * *

It’s not awful. At all. Other than it kept trying to cover the scar and most of his moles. It took some fiddling to get it to stop that, but once it knew what it was supposed to do…the results are… Pretty good, actually. He doesn’t look like he stayed up all night the night before. And the damn thing is significantly better at dealing with his hair than he is. It’s pulled back tidy and sleek much faster than he can do it.

“It feels weird. Like my face is…not mine.”

Rey’s nodding along at that, as she slips into her outfit for this. Since today is about him _with_ The Order, as opposed to yesterday where he _was_ The Order, he’s in his Command Blacks, making it clear that he’s one of them. And she’s putting on her own version of that. The hiyanfu is snug around her waist, falling to her thighs, and the pattern is light pinks and greens. It’s soft and pretty, and her hair is up, but she’s not covered in swirly silks and glittering jems.

The only jewelry she’s wearing are the two pieces she intends to never take off again. Her marriage band and the mark of the Order of the Maji. 

C8 taps on the door before entering. “Good, you’re almost ready. Lt. Colonel Frakes will be here shortly.”

“Okay,” Kylo says.

 

* * *

Jon doesn’t say anything about the makeup to Kylo but he does nod with approval, and then says to Rey, “If I thought I could have gotten him to do that, I would have tried yesterday.”

Rey smirks, a bit.

Kylo rolls his eyes before saying, “Yesterday, I didn’t look like I’d been up all night the night before.”

 

 

* * *

Ten minutes to go. They’re in the same chamber he was in this time last year. Overlooking a _lot_ more people, spread out in uncountable numbers, waiting, for him… Them.

It’s different. This time, they’re faces. Millions, literally, of faces waiting. Some of them still have Stormtrooper armor, especially the ones who aren’t normally stationed on the _Supremacy,_ but these days, unless they’re fighting, most of his people are bare-faced.

Next year, save his security people, (who hopefully won’t _need_ armor) all of them will be bare-faced for this. Allowing everyone to see them, allowing their own, personal selves to attach to the Order.

Seeing all of them, kilometer after kilometer of them, spread out around the stage… Both of them are getting nervous.

Kylo steps to Rey, turns her so she’s not looking at them, and rests his forehead against hers. Giving and taking comfort. He’s balanced on a moment between his own jitteriness, because he is feeling that high buzz of nervous that goes with things like this, and her own, deeper, sharper fear of the changes that are coming, and the sense, deep in both of them, that this is right and necessary. But right doesn’t mean easy or fearless.

For a moment, they just breathe. He can feel her hand in his, and a sense of _feel it and let it flow._

_Let it pass through you._

_Advice from Luke?_ she thinks.

_A long time ago._

_And here, now?_

He breathes again, his hand in hers, his forehead on hers, in and out. Together, they find the balance point.

Her voice in his mind. _It’s not calm, not peaceful, but aware and centered, stable, excited, active, but with purpose._

 

 

He nods, and passes the feeling back to her. Ready to move when the time is right, but it’s not right, not yet. He’s felt this before, in his fight, in the moments where he’s been able to slow time down between heartbeats, hyper aware of everything around him, looking for the edge to sneak his blade into.

She feels that, adds an image of him, one he obviously could not see, because it’s him, waiting a beat, two, for the next strike against the Praetorian Guard.

“Different sort of battle,” he says, using his voice this time.

She’d nod, but that would mean moving her head, so she just squeezes his hand.

And for a moment, they wait, like that, balanced, with each other.

They jerk a little, when they hear a voice, Leia’s voice, say, to Rey, “I may have been wrong. This is how you thought it would work out, didn’t you?”

Rey feels Kylo drawing closer to her, stiffening, wrapping his arm around her, and she’s not sure if he’s protecting her or himself. Likely a bit of both.

It’s clear though, from the half-smile on her face, the Leia doesn’t mean any harm.

Rey thinks back, remembering being on the beach, at Lirium, alone with Leia, the warmth of Kylo’s body cooling quickly on her back, and the smell of him still on her skin. Leia telling her that it wasn’t going to go the way she thought it would, and that she was so in love. Unspoken, but indicated, that she wasn’t seeing reality, because of said love.

For a heartbeat, she wonders what glorious futures Leia dreamed of with Han, futures that never did, and never could, happen.

Rey wraps an arm around Kylo’s waist, and gives him a little squeeze. “It’s not how I thought it’d work out.” Her finger touches his marriage band. “It’s better.”

Leia smiles. She’s looking at both of them, seeing them together for the first time. Her appraising look gets Kylo to speak.

“Mom…” Kylo’s voice is tight, and it’s clear from the look on his face that he’s feeling delicately balanced enough right now, so he’d really appreciate not having his heart ripped out right this particular second.

“I’m not here to rain on you. We’re not going to fight… I didn’t do this enough before, but…” Now Leia looks a little nervous. “Encouragement. You were named for a last hope in a dark time, and I know that name… didn’t work for you… Probably because it got muddied up with too many other things, but when you get out there, and give that speech, you’re going to give a lot of people hope.

“And you asked once, what Ben was supposed to be… And… before everything else, before you were born, before… all of it, Ben was hope. Hope for a future better than the present he was born in and the past that created him. And I thought you’d… like to hear me say it, that you’re doing good. That you’re giving people hope. That this matters.”

He’s squeezing Rey’s hand so hard it’s starting to hurt, but she doesn’t poke him, or make him stop, because she can feel that right now is what he considers a really bad time to break down crying, and this is what’s keeping him from doing that.

He nods, chewing on his lip, voice gravelly, and says, “Thanks, Mom.” 

Leia leans up to kiss his cheek, and of course he can’t feel it, but his eyes close and he shudders a bit. Then Leia’s gone, and he’s standing there with Rey, both of them quiet and a bit shocked. His hand slowly loosens from hers, and she says to him, “After. There’ll be time after for that.”

He nods, still chewing on his lip.

Jon knocks on the door. “Five minutes.”

Rey shakes her hands, jittering with them, feeling a buzz of electricity, and her doing it, giving movent to that feeling breaks through him, and he starts to jump up and down, like her, doing something physical and active, just to get it out.

That lasts a minute, and then they’re both feeling a little more settled.

He takes her hand in his, and looks at the door. “Ready?”

She nods. “Yeah, I am. Let’s go.”

“We’ll be a little early.”

She shrugs. “So what? I’m ready to move now, and you are, too.”

And they are, so they do, and amazingly enough, no one seems to care if they move from one waiting area to another one a few minutes ahead of schedule.

 

 

* * *

This time last year, he was the only one up on this stage.

This time he’s not alone. Jon chose not to be up here. He’s still preferring to fly under-the-scanners, though after last night, more people have noticed him, so his under-the-scanners days are numbered and that number is dropping.

Rey’s here, though, at his left. Kinear and Schiff are here, behind and to his right. Next year, he’s sure there’ll be more of them. More trusted seconds and thirds in command. More alliances and allies he’ll wish to honor or highlight.

He can feel Rey’s a little fidgety, still not exactly sure why she’s here. Not sure what she adds to this. He flashes her the sense of him squeezing her hand, and thinks _At the very least, you make me feel less nervous about doing things like this._

That gets a little mental smirk out of her. _And at most?_

_At most, it’s about time they know their queen. At most, maybe one day you’ll decide to stand up here with something of your own to say. At most, Mistress Rey of the Maji, you get to spread the balance, faster and farther than you ever dreamed of._

She smiles at him. _Go give your speech._

He settles himself in front of the podium and into the feel of it, a waiting breath, reading the crowd, they’re eager and content, approving, a little bored, looking forward to getting to the fun stuff.

Probably as good as he could hope for.

He gives Rey another little mental hand squeeze and feels her squeeze back, and then takes one more breath before starting to speak.

 

 

“It’s the most dangerous idea in the galaxy, and we’re living it. No one, no matter how high born, or how low, no matter how light or dark, wealthy or poor, need ever kneel before a leader not of their choosing.

“Power doesn’t come from the biggest gun or the fastest ships. It doesn’t come from magic or faith. It’s not about fear or sweet words.

“Power, real power, comes from accord. It comes from people, millions and billions of them deciding to put their will to a task and doing it.

“This time last year, there were 2.3 million of us, moving together to a joined future, to a better galaxy.

“As of today, there are six million, one hundred and eleven thousand, four hundred and nineteen of us. And we are growing, fast. We are here because we want to be, because we _chose_ to work with each other for this.

“We are here to overthrow the idea that people are subjects, servants, things to be played with, moved around like pieces on a board. We’re here to flood the galaxy with the idea that everyone has a destiny of their own making, of their own chosing, and _everyone_ has full rights to do what they need to do to get there.        

“My recruiting stations are spreading. Eventually, every major city in the galaxy will have one, and from there…

“Five years. That’s all it takes. Five years service buys anyone in the galaxy perfect freedom. Join me and stay with me, or do your five and go wherever you like, be whatever, whoever you like. Five years gets you mobility. It gets you the ability to conceive a better life and move to it. Five years gets you a voice. It gets you the power to spread the idea of that better life around. It gives you the ability to give that better life to your children.

“It’s all anyone needs. Just the chance to reach out and grab your future, your destiny.

“And I stand here, today, with the rest of the Order, and promise that chance is there. Reach out for us, and we will come. It will take time, but eventually, anyone, anywhere, who wants to burn their past, start over fresh, and embrace their future will have a home with us.

“And from there… The only thing between you and your dreams is the effort you’re willing to put into it.

“From there, the idea will spread, that the only thing of any real value in this galaxy is people. Minerals, energy, tools, equipment, land, space… all of it is useless without people.

“And from there…” He smiles at this. “From there, every system will understand, that if it wants to keep people, it’s got to create governments worthy of them.

“Like I said, it’s the most dangerous idea in the galaxy. No one, ever, anywhere, need kneel before a leader not of their choosing. No one need exist and bear it. A better life is out there, waiting, and anyone who wishes can reach for it. And if your current leaders won’t give you the chance at it, _I will._

“We’re changing the galaxy. We’re changing the rules of the game. And we’re doing it one person, one family at a time.

“This is a job that will never be done, but the value comes from doing it, from spreading this idea, from granting as many people as we can get the ability to make their own decisions, chose their own lives, and offer them control of their own futures.

“In the last year our numbers more than doubled. This year, they’ll likely triple. And we will continue to grow. We will spread throughout the galaxy. Lighting it on fire with our ideas.

“In six years, there should be close to a hundred million of us in the Order.

“In six years we should have close to twenty million citizens, and in six years all twenty million of you will have your vote. You’ll chose your representatives, and from there, we’ll start making plans for what we’re going to do, beyond expand this idea through the entirety of the stars.

“To the other systems out there, to the political powers that be, I have one thing to say, ‘Do better.’ Offer your people a better deal than I do, and you’ll never have anything to fear from me.

“To every person out there, everyone who can hear my voice, everyone who can catch a whisper of a rumor of what I’m doing, look around. Do you have the life you want? Can you get to where you need to be? If not, I’m here, and five years with me will get you what you need to go where you want to be.

Kylo extends his hand. “If you want a better life, a better galaxy, come join me.”

And again, he feels the power of it, the force of his people, millions of them in this ship alone, thrumming with approval. Cheering. Him, his plans, themselves, each other, feeling like there’s nothing at all, they can’t do.

The galaxy, the universe, is theirs for the shaping, and they’re going to make it into something bold and beautiful.

He didn’t plan it. Not this part. He knew he was going to reach out, but… But it’s right. He turns to her, hand outstretched, this time in joy, not despair.

 

 

She’s looking up at him, from his hand to his eyes, and he sees the smile light her gaze first, before it touches her lips.

He feels Rey’s hand in his, her fingers twining with his, and he grins down at her.

He can remember reaching a hand out to her, in a burning throne room, begging her to join him, offering her his everything. He remembers the feel of that moment, of his universe on fire, and hers spinning out of control, and the future leaking away from them.

She touches him now, stepping closer, her hand in his, her fingers on his, and a promise made long ago in glimpses of the future is here, now, real.

She smiles at him, also feeling that moment more than two years past. Seeing his eyes, burning and desperate before, wide and triumphant now.

She squeezes his hand again, smiling still, looking up at him, and thinks, _Yes._

 

 

His breath catches in his chest, this is real and now, and they’re going to do it.

He rubs his lips together, nods quickly, decides decorum be damned, pulls her to him in a sweeping kiss, and thinks _Yes_ back at her as both of them feel the combined approving amusement of millions of minds sweep over them at this display of affection.

The galaxy is theirs, and it’s time to move forward in it, together.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And, once again, we’ll leave them there, hovering at the end of another book of their story, poised to move onto the next.
> 
> Is there a next? Yes. As a lot of you have remarked, I write fast. That said, I don’t write *that* fast. In order to do my nifty twice weekly update schedule, and make art, I need a good long head start. 
> 
> Right now, Book Three of the Tao of the Force-verse, Public/Private, is about 150 pages long. I’ll hopefully have it close to 300-400, with every major chapter planned out and at least sketched, before I start posting again round about Christmas-time. (Merry Christmas to us! After all, if Disney won’t give us a new movie this year, I might as well get another book into play. :) 
> 
> What’s coming up next? Rey and Kylo moving from being Rey and Kylo to the Master and the Mistress of the Order of the Maji. Learning how to be public figures. Figuring out what the hell they’re actually doing with this Order of the Maji thing. In this installment, we followed Dark Order and Light Maji as they both continued to balance and find something to do with themselves. In the next installment we’re going to expand outward, more time with Light Order (Jon) and Dark Maji (Poe). More time with what the balance is and means and does and how it’s seen outside of just Kylo and Rey. We’re going to play with our teenage Maji, see them exploring their wider worlds and selves. And of course, we’ve got Rose and Finn, and the concept of dark and light neutral, and what they’re up to, and how they fit into the idea of balance. And, also, of course, of course, we’ve got wily old people who’ve seen it all, done most of it, and are hatching plans within plans within plans. And, because I’m a romantic at heart, we’ll wrap all of that together, all of this learning, and politics, and being, and loving. All of the identity and figuring out where Rey and Kylo end, and the Master and the Mistress begin, into, not just one, but TWO weddings.
> 
> Yeah, that’s right, I’m gonna give you two weddings. A public one, and a private one. A wedding for Rey and Kylo, and an affairs of state, formal, gala for the Master and the Mistress.
> 
> So, take this as your save the date card, because soon, you’ll get a note in your inbox saying you are cordially invited to share in the wedding of Kylo and Rey Ren. 
> 
> Follow me here, or keep track of me on twitter (@KerylRaist), tumblr (kerylraist.tumblr.com) or ko-fi (kofi.com/kerylraist) or the blog (kerylraist.wordpress.com). I'll periodically post bits and pieces online, behind the scenes bits, what sort of art stuff I'm doing, and whatnot.
> 
> When I'm ready to go live, I will update this story one last time with a “new stuff coming soon" post.
> 
> Until then, I’ve loved writing this, love you guys for reading it, had a blast with all of your comments, and I’ll see you soon!
> 
> Keryl


	65. Not Quite...

Hey Loves,

Okay, this isn't quite the update I know you're hoping for. 

When I left you, the plan was to start posting Public/Private 'round about Christmas, and follow my Sunday/Wednesday update cycle.

And then life happened. In November, my dad got to his final illness, and passed on the 27th. Understandably, I wasn't doing a lot of high quality writing then. On top of that, my kids then caught the tummy bug of all tummy bugs, and just when they started feeling better, we got clobbered with 13 inches of snow, and school's been closed the last three days. Oh, and for kicks and giggles, Tumblr, which provided my image hosting, went on some sort of purity crusade, and now I've got to re-upload all of my artwork, because it's likely they're going to scrub all of the good stuff from my blog.

All of which means my writing time has been a tad curtailed. 

Upside, I do have more than 500 pages of Public/Private, and it's sequel Darkness/Light written. I've got the first six chapters good and solid, ready to go. (And those chapters are *long.*) 

Downside, I've got no art yet. And when I was doing that lovely twice a week schedule, I was writing 43 chapters ahead of where I was posting. 

So, here's the question, do you guys prefer story sooner (Dec 23rd, Happy Christmas to all of us!) with a slower update cycle (once a week probably, maybe a bit less) or hold off until I've got a serious buffer in place, and then aim for my 2x a week? I'll admit, I'm probably leaning toward sooner and less often, but I figured I'd see what all of you preferred.

I hope life's being kinder to you than it is to me right now, and I hope all of us are having a lot of fun with Kylo and Rey, soon.


	66. The Update You Were Waiting For...

First off, thank you to all of you for the kind words and condolences. I appreciated them.

Now, for the bit you've all been waiting for. [Public/Private: Chapter One: The Order of the Maji: The Players](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17110358), is live.

I'm planning on a, for now, once a week update schedule, Saturdays or Sundays, and maybe a tad slower than that. We'll see how it goes. 

I've also shifted my art style a bit, more realistic, less comic-booky. Not sure if I'll hold to this, or go back to comic-bookish, but... At least for now... We're going somewhere like here.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome back everyone! I hope you've had a good break. I've been... uh... not exactly working my ass off on my original fiction, but I have been doing a lot with this one. Expect updates on Sundays and Wednesdays. 400+ pages are done on this one already, so settle in, it's going to be a long ride. ; )


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